On 7/9/16 6:58 PM, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 16:38:02 UTC, Max Samukha wrote:
On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 14:58:55 UTC, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 06:31:01 UTC, Max Samukha wrote:
On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 04:32:25 UTC, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
This is a tangent from the subject of this thread, but: No, that just
says how it is implemented, not what it means / intends. See "the 7
stages of naming", here:
http://arlobelshee.com/good-naming-is-a-process-not-a-single-step/
(That resource is talking about identifier naming, not keywords. But
it applies anyway.)
You have a point, but the name is still not 'just bonkers', all things
considered. Metonymy is justified in many cases, and I think this is
one of them. What better name would you propose?
First, I'm not proposing a change to existing keywords, I'm using
existing examples to talk about future language changes. Second, I had
to look up "metonymy" in Wikipedia. Using its example: Suppose
"Hollywood" referred to both the LA movie industry and, say, the jewelry
industry; that's roughly equivalent to the pattern I'm talking about.
Way ahead of ya. The average English noun has 7.8 meanings, and the
average verb has 12.
Others in this thread have suggested alternatives, many of those have
things to criticize, but I would prefer something cryptic over something
that has multiple subtly-different meanings in the language.
I'm drawn to "#if", except people might end up thinking D has a macro
preprocessor. "ifct" seems fine except I'm not sure everyone would agree
how to pronounce it. Compile-time context seems significant enough that
maybe it warrants punctuation, like "*if" or "$if".
No. As an aside I see your point but "static if" is the worst example to
support it, by a mile.
I especially want to establish: If we were adding a new feature as
significant as "static if", and we decided a keyword was better than
punctuation, could we stomach the cost of making a new keyword, or would
we shoehorn it either into one of the existing keywords unused in that
context, or start talking about using attributes? I have a lot of
experience with backward-compatibility but I still don't understand the
reticence to introduce new keywords (assuming a freely available
migration tool).
It just depends. There is no rigid strategy here. Worrying about the
hypothetical possibility seems unnecessary.
Andrei
