On Monday, 31 October 2016 at 20:45:56 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
The "reserved" words I'm referring to are not necessarily
keywords in the language but otherwise words that should be
avoided, especially for defining methods in aggregates. I'm
mostly thinking of built-in properties like .init, .classinfo,
.sizeof, .outer and so on.
All of the above can be used as variable names. Some of the
above names can be used as methods in aggregates but some
cannot. Of the above names only "sizeof" cannot be used as a
method name.
Would it be better to try to minimize these special words and
instead use either compiler recognized functions/templates or
something like __traits? If they were compiler recognized
functions, defined somewhere in druntime, the normal language
lookup rules could be used to disambiguate the compiler
recognized functions from user defined functions. Or if a
__trait is used, that would have it's own namespace and not
cause any conflicts.
In the latest release of DMD (2.072.0) TypeInfo.init has been
deprecate in favor of TypeInfo.initializer. That would not have
been needed if .init wasn't a built-in property but instead a
compiler recognized function.
Thoughts? Too late to change, to much could would break?
This information from Wiki, I hope it will be useful. That
general reserved words and keywords need not coincide, but in
most modern languages keywords are a subset of reserved words, as
this makes parsing easier, since keywords cannot be confused with
identifiers. In some languages, like C or Python, reserved words
and keywords coincide, while in other languages, like Java, all
keywords are reserved words, but some reserved words are not
keywords – these are "reserved for future use". In yet other
languages, such as the older languages ALGOL, FORTRAN and PL/I,
there are keywords but no reserved words, with keywords being
distinguished from identifiers by other means. This makes parsing
more difficult with look-ahead parsers necessary.
