On Wed, 09 Nov 2011 01:20:44 +0200, Walter Bright
<newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:
On 11/8/2011 9:37 AM, Gor Gyolchanyan wrote:
Polluting keyword space is not a good idea unless it's impossible to
interfere with identifiers.
If keywords used a special syntax, like starting with a special
character, then this wouldn't be an issue
The whole "too many keywords" issue strikes me as strange. English has
over a million words in it. Who cares if a language uses 80 or 100 of
them? What difference can it possibly make? How can an extra 20 words
pollute the million word namespace (and not including any non-word
identifiers (like inout))?
Another silly aspect of this issue is all keywords could be replaced by
a sequence of special characters. For example, we could replace inout
with ##. Voila! Less keywords! But is that better?
Keywords exist to make the language more readable. That's why we use
inout instead of ##, and it's why we use + instead of add.
D is a rich language. That means it's going to have more syntax, more
keywords and more symbols.
My only concern with keywords is that to me a keyword must lift its own
weight,
For specific issues such as this, if there is a library solution (which i
think is not applicable here),
or a solution which requires an overload to an already defined keyword, it
would be IMO a better choice.
I can see why we have a keyword for it, and why it is not @inout. I
suggested "return" because it semantically fits the definition of inout.
Yet, you are again right, i didn't think about neither local/variable
usage nor tuple syntax.
