The problem is, that by adding a new keyword we could accidentally invalidate lots of identifiers. Everything else is true, i agree :-)
On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 3:20 AM, Walter Bright <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/8/2011 9:37 AM, Gor Gyolchanyan wrote: >> >> Polluting keyword space is not a good idea unless it's impossible to >> interfere with identifiers. >> If keywords used a special syntax, like starting with a special >> character, then this wouldn't be an issue > > > The whole "too many keywords" issue strikes me as strange. English has over > a million words in it. Who cares if a language uses 80 or 100 of them? What > difference can it possibly make? How can an extra 20 words pollute the > million word namespace (and not including any non-word identifiers (like > inout))? > > Another silly aspect of this issue is all keywords could be replaced by a > sequence of special characters. For example, we could replace inout with ##. > Voila! Less keywords! But is that better? > > Keywords exist to make the language more readable. That's why we use inout > instead of ##, and it's why we use + instead of add. > > D is a rich language. That means it's going to have more syntax, more > keywords and more symbols. >
