"Andrei Alexandrescu" <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote in message news:gut7lb$ue...@digitalmars.com... > > (0) Must be recognizable and understood at first sight without the user > running to the manual and looking it up. >
I've never considered that a particularly good criterea in most cases. Most language features/syntax are non-obvious at a glance for anyone who isn't already familiar with it. And typically, you only need to look it up once and then next time you see it you'll remember. People had the same complaint when '$' was proposed for blah.length, but seriously, one it was included who here has ever had a non-trivial time learning and internalizing that? Does '!()' scream "template" to someone who hasn't used D or looked at the D docs? Of course not. But it works fine. And I sure someone could have easily said the same about the '#' at the beginning of preprocessor directives back whenever those were first created. But who ever has any real trouble with that? I didn't even the very first time I was introduced to it. This '(0)' is barely an issue at all.