Hi, hope you're all enjoying the properties debate.
I've been seeing the "too many keywords" argument a lot lately, and I
think it's definitely a valid argument. "shared" and "body" in
particular are rather annoying keywords since I frequently use them in
code. And if users are deciding not to use D because of the number of
keywords, that's even worse.
The idea of "kewyord" as a parser construct is antiquated thinking. Look
at C#: "get", "set", "value", "event", "var", etc. are only keywords in
a particular context. C++/CLI takes it a step further (from
http://blogs.msdn.com/hsutter/archive/2003/11/23/53519.aspx ). There are
three new reserved words ("gcnew", "generic", "nullptr") and a few
multi-word keywords ("for each", "enum/interface/ref/value
class/struct") as well as some contextual keywords that can only appear
in certain positions.
In D, without a significant change to the lexer/parser, any keywords
that cannot appear in the same place as an identifier could be made
legal identifiers easily. Off the top of my head, "in", "out", "body",
"module", "unittest", "import", "throw" and probably a few others could
be freed up.
With some parser lookahead, you could add modifiers and storage classes
to the list and probably dozens of others. If braces were required in
try/catch statements, "try", "catch", and "finally" could be added.
Further, this might be pretty easy to implement (i.e. Walter, if you're
interested, I'm willing to make a patch). It's all backwards-compatible
and would even work in D1.
Thoughts?
