On Wednesday, 5 October 2016 at 18:41:02 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
On 2016-10-05 19:14, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
Agreed - I have exactly the same problem with "version", which
is also
really common for, well, to hold a version number of a
component. Body
is annoying too.
But, can keywords actually sanely be removed from the language
without
breaking the world?
In Ruby most keywords are not reserved words. Example:
class Foo
def class
end
end
When the compiler sees the second "class" it already knows that
this is a method declaration because of the "def" keyword.
Actually calling this method requires a receiver:
class Foo
def class
end
def bar
class # this won't compile
self.class # this will work since the compiler knows that
is has to be a method call because of the dot
end
end
In Scala it's possible to wrap a keyword in backticks, this is
necessary to be able to call a Java method that uses a name
that is a keyword in Scala but not in Java:
// Java
class Foo
{
void def () {}
}
// Scala
val a = new Foo()
a.`def`()
To remove D's current keywords and add them to the syntax would
be quite an undertaking I think. If someone was so inclined,
they could take the full syntax as it exists today, and try to
modify it so that the keywords would be removed and added to the
applicable grammar rules. I'd be curious to see how this would
change the syntax rules, if it would be ALOT more complicated or
if it only added some minor complication. My gut says that this
would explode in complexity, but maybe not? You'd also have to
make sure that the new syntax is still unambiguous, there's
probably tools that can verify this.
