On Monday, 17 July 2017 at 18:54:37 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
IMO, the observations "used rarely" and "attention-seeking
notation" are better satisfied by an attribute named @noreturn
than some strange, convoluted, arcane invocation like
`typeof(assert(0))`. Because:
(1) "used rarely" means it should be as non-intrusive as
possible as far as the language is concerned -- we should not
spend a lot of language real estate on something that's rarely
used, nor should it be something complicated to implement,
and/or introduces tricky corner cases that we're likely to get
wrong on first attempt. A @noreturn attribute is non-intrusive
-- doesn't interact with anything else in the language, easy to
implement -- has no tricky corner cases.
(2) "attention-seeking": an arcane invocation like
`typeof(assert(0))` is harder to parse and therefore more
likely to invite people to just gloss over it as
"incomprehensible gibberish that I'll just ignore unless I have
to look further", than catch people's attention. Whereas an
annotation like `@noreturn` is immediately obvious by its very
presence, with a name that instantly tells you what it does
while it still holds your attention.
I see `typeof(assert(0))` as the same kind of over-engineering
of
something trivially solved and relatively unimportant ("rarely
used")
that has unfortunately plagued C++ design and led C++ to become
the mess
it is today. It's sad to see D start down the same path...
T
(3) LDC and GDC already have an implementation in the form of an
attribute so we can just have an AliasSeq of the front end
recognised attribute and the one for GDC and LDC (assuming my
attributes DIP goes through).
