Walter Bright:
I doubt they'll want to use an @tailrec attribute.
In Scala there is "@tailrec":
http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/annotation/tailrec.html
In both F# and OcaML there is the "rec" keyword:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233232.aspx
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-400/manual003.html#toc4
In Clojure there is "recur" (that is not an annotation):
http://clojure.org/special_forms?responseToken=08ea4841337f67bb8f07663aa70b03aca#recur
I think functional programmers are willing to use @tailrec
attribute if it's well designed and it does what's written on its
tin.
What about the @continuation
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style )?
I doubt they'll want to use that attribute, either.
I don't know. It's more general than the @tailrec, but probably
many C and C++ and Java programmers don't even know what it is.
But it allows a programming style that in some case is
interesting (far cleaner than computed gotos).
In any case, D supports more styles of programming than any
other language I can think of. I doubt adding even more will be
that helpful.
I think a basic form of pattern matching implemented with the
switch construct is a good idea for D.
Bye,
bearophile
