On Wednesday, 27 August 2014 at 19:42:40 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
I'd be more convinced if the following statements were false: 1. Writing an automated upgrade tool is difficult 2. The compiler would have no way of knowing what @nothrow means
Oh, there's no question that having an automated tool improves the situation, but given how Walter seems to think with regards to stuff like this, I'd be surprised if he thought that an automated tool made it acceptable. Even if it's easy to fix, it's still breaking code. He freaks out if all folks have to change is a compiler switch. It's always hard to convince Walter that a breaking change is acceptable or desirable, and when all you're doing is fixing aesthetics, it's pratically a guarantee that he won't be in favor of it. He values avoiding code breakage far, far more than he values aesthetics or consistency, and now that D has been around for as long as it has, Andrei tends to agree with him, whereas it used to be that you could convince Andrei that a change was worth it a lot more easily. So, I'd be very surprised if either of them could be convinced that this was worth it.
Personally, I would like it if the situation were more consistent, but I don't think that the proposal really fixes that. It might improve it, but we're stuck with inconsistencies regardless, so I don't see much point in changing it. The way that it could have been done "right" IMHO was if we'd never introduced @ for anything but UDAs and just used keywords for all of the attributes, but it's too late for than now.
- Jonathan M Davis
