On Monday, 26 January 2015 at 11:39:23 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
immutable, inout, and deprecated all don't have @. So, most
function
attributes _don't_ have @ on them, and we just added @ to some
of them,
making things even _less_ consistent. In fact, priore to this,
@safe,
@trusted, @system, and @property were the _only_ function
attributes with @
on them. So, if we really wanted to improve consistency IMHO,
we'd get rid
of @ from everything that's built-in and leave it for
user-defined
attributes, but that would break existing code too.
I agree that you need to let "@" act as some kind of mnemonic
and therefore assign meaning to it.
One meaning would be to only use "@" with attributes that do not
affect computation, typing, overloading etc and use it only for
safety-checks and optimization hints (like inlining).
Besides it would be easy to change the parser so that terms can
be reused as symbols if the grammar stays sound. I think that is
true for most function attributes anyway.
