On 11/14/2012 01:53 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 11/13/2012 12:56 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
An insightful talk by Guy Steele on what makes a language successful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
Guy says something interesting in there that's applicable to one of our
current discussions.
Particularly, should we allow:
@identifier
as a user-defined attribute, in potential conflict with future reserved
attribute words, or not?
Guy makes the argument that users need to be able to extend the
vocabulary of a language and have those new words look like built-in
ones. We have that today, of course, with the ability of defining new
types. There is no special syntax that says "this is a user-defined
type, not a keyword."
Well,
template Foo(alias a){ }
struct S{}
alias S X; // ok
alias int Y; // ok
mixin Foo!S; // ok
mixin Foo!int; // not ok
Please fix that. (Everything should be ok.)
I think this is a compelling argument, and tips the scales in its favor.
Probably we've been excessively worried about the problems of adding a
new builtin attribute type.
