On Friday, 22 January 2016 at 02:13:56 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Thursday, 21 January 2016 at 23:48:14 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
It wouldn't be too bad, as such things go. But it also serves
little practical purpose; why break people's code for purely
aesthetic reasons?
1. Because it isn't purely aesthetic, it is also a question of
usability.
2. Because very little code has been written in D.
3. Because D stands no chance of widespread adoption without
fixing the usability issues.
4. Because you can have two parsers in the same compiler, one
for legacy source files and one for contemporary code.
The only code that will break is code that relies on string
mixins, which is a horrible idea anyway.
But D should fix all the semantic issues first. Unfortunately
there is no focus on this, only on adding new features.
IMHO: D is a dying language until there is a focus on bringing
both coherent semantics and syntax to the language. It is not
like adding C++ linkage without bringing semantics closer to
C++ will be a saviour.
There is too much focus on having a wide range of 70% solutions
with marginal support.
I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point, but I think
the question of whether a few attributes have an @ attached to
them or not ranks pretty low on the list of "70% solutions with
marginal support" that need fixing/fleshing out. If this is truly
among the most pressing issues with D, then D must be in great
shape.
It seems like poor allocation of resources (both those of the D
development team, and those of the D users who would be forced to
update their code) to put much effort into this right now, when
there are so many other issues of greater practical import to
work on.
