On Monday, 26 January 2015 at 16:10:53 UTC, Jonathan Marler wrote:
I agree with Jonathan's points, this solution doesn't seem like
an improvement. If I understand the problem, we don't want to
make every attribute use the '@' symbol because it looks bad
and would cause a lot of code changes for sake of consistency.
However, on the other hand, we don't want to support the new
properties because we have to add them as keywords which would
break code using those words and would make the language more
restrictive (nothing can be named nogc/safe/...).
Assuming I understand the problem, couldn't we modify the
language grammar to support more attributes without making them
keywords? Then we can omit the '@' on future code (and fix the
old code if we want) and we don't have to litter the language
with new keywords.
I understand that doing this may be fairly complicated. This
may create some ambiguities in the grammar that would need to
be handled carefully, but if it can work I think this would be
a good option.
I think the short answer is that it's WAY too complicated for the
benefit. Also, why burden the syntax highlighter, let alone the
human reader, with ambiguities like this?
