Robert Fraser wrote: > Ary Borenszweig wrote: >> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs/DIP6 > > I think annotations are a good idea, but turning keywords already in the > language into annotations seems kinda pointless & would kill backwards > compatibility. In C#/Java some things are modifiers while others are > annotations -- and with good reason. > > IMO, the focus of annotations should be mostly on things _external_ to > the compiler. So, serializability, thread safety, etc. Really, I think > annotations should be for compile-time reflection (so like someone else > said __traits(annotations, symbol) should return a tuple of annotation > structs.
Seconded. Annotations sound like a useful feature especially if they can be created and manipulated by the programmer, which would require syntactic distinction. I never did much care for java's annotation syntax, but I do think turning most if not all of the keywords mentioned into annotations is a good idea, at least behind the scenes. Off the top of my head, it could solve the function <-> delegate ref parameter problem.