On Friday, 20 June 2014 at 22:01:31 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 06/20/2014 09:22 PM, Brian Schott wrote:
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP64
Attributes in D have two problems:
1. There are too many of them and declarations are getting too
verbose
2. New attributes use @ and the old ones do not.
I've created a DIP to address these issues.
Why not make the built-in attributes proper symbols instead and
use
alias Seq(T...)=T;
alias spiffy = Seq!(pure,nothrow,safe);
float mul(float a, float b) @spiffy{ }
?
This will also allow use cases such as passing attributes by
alias.
I think this would make the language a lot cleaner, and can be
taken even further:
@extern("C++", "some.namespace")
class C {
@private int x;
}
Here `extern` is a regular function that returns an instance of
some compiler-defined type. This makes "built-in" attributes just
particular cases of properties (that happen to be recognized by
the compiler).
"Attribute" and "property" are pretty much synonyms in English,
and it always seemed strange to me that D had to define them as
different--yet confusingly similar--entities.
