On 21.09.2014 19:17, Boian Mitov wrote:
In general I would prefer to see this implemented with attributes rather than with new keywords. For god shake, we already have more keywords in this language than it is healthy. We should be extremely cautions when adding new ones. That is one of the beauty of the attributes. They can eliminate a large number of keywords, and expand the language dynamically (trough the library not trough the compiler). If you implement it with attributes, there is almost no need for any big changes in the compiler at least in the parsing side. Adding new keyword will probably propagate all the way to the tokenizer.
I openly *hate* the attribute syntax. It's just not Pascal and simply copied from their .Net compiler, because hey, other .Net compilers do that just like that... -.-
Also considering that the trunk compiler currently does not have support for attributes (let's put aside that branch for now) it is definitely easier to add a new keyword, because the compiler is built in a way to allow the easy addition of new keywords. Additionally using attributes would mean that one would need to add detection for special attributes. And that's more annoying stuff then a keyword is. Additionally this can be added more safely to other modes (e.g. macpas, which supports classes as well) than the attributes can.
Regards, Sven _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
