On Sunday, 15 May 2016 at 11:04:22 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
That's mostly due to the amount of semantic special casing, it's not just narrow syntax concerns. E.g. 'void' is a "type" that is claimed to have no values, but functions returning void can still terminate normally.
It may have values, but you cannot access them. A pointer to void is roughly the same as the identity-capability «Tag» in Pony (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/capabilities/reference-capabilities.html). So void is a "view" on an object that only may give access to the identity, but not the content: «I know of your existence, but not what you are».
In C it is not uncommon to cast variables to void, in order to silence "unused variable" warnings... Basically saying "I am using this, but not accessing it"...
