On Monday, 26 January 2015 at 19:59:58 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 11:50:19AM -0800, Walter Bright via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On 1/26/2015 3:39 AM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>Personally, I'd much prefer that we not make this change.
It's good to have this discussion.
Previously, it's all been advocacy and "break my code" by
forcing a
change from pure => @pure.
Just a few days ago on slashdot, an anonymous D user wrote:
"A horrible mix of keywords and annotation syntax for
function/method attributes ('const', 'pure', and 'nothrow'
are all
keywords, but '@property', and '@nogc' are annotations)"
for why he won't use D anymore.
Frankly, I think that is a great bikeshedding non-issue that
distracts
us from what is important. I hope that by doing this PR, we can
actually decide that it isn't worth it, i.e. I'd be happy to
get
consensus and revert it.
While I generally agree with the sentiment that this great
debate over
syntax is distracting from more important issues, one
particularly
attractive point about forcing @ on annotations is that const
(as a type
qualified) and @const (as a function annotation) become
syntactically
distinct:
const int myFunc() @const {}
vs. the current confusing syntax:
const int myFunc() const {}
Does this alone make it worth it? I'm skeptical. But I thought
it should
be pointed out regardless.
I wouldn't count `const` among functions annotations. It applies
to `this`, not to the function.
