On Sunday, 27 January 2013 at 13:42:33 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
On Sunday, 27 January 2013 at 13:24:31 UTC, TommiT wrote:
But, joking aside, I think that all hate against optional
parentheses stems from the increase of ambiguity they
indisputably cause. However, let's imagine a future where your
perfect D IDE paints function calls red, and variables blue.
Then, it will be obvious to you which identifiers are
variables and which are function calls based on their color.
In this situation it will feel silly to have to write those
empty parentheses, because they don't make the code any less
ambiguous (it's already perfectly unambiguous because of the
colors) and, infact, those empty parentheses make the code (a
bit) harder to read.
If we require clever IDE to distinguish visually something as
basic as data semantics and callable semantics it is an
indicator language design is screwed. Relying on IDE features
is what made Java unusable for expressive, robust code. I may
use an IDE help when I need to learn architecture level
connections in new project, but at scope level semantics for
reader should be perfectly clear and unambiguous even if opened
in notepad.
2 cents from vim user and optional parens hater here.
You're being an extremist here. From a vim user and automagic
function call hater as well ;)
First many reliable code have been written in Java. Quite a lot
of it in fact. And refusing IDE help make no real sense. Even vim
is an IDE, and not a simple editor.
