DMD 0.177 release [Length in slice expressions]

Steve Horne stephenwantshornenospam100 at aol.com
Fri Dec 22 19:29:10 PST 2006


On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 06:24:28 -0800, "Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website
For Email)" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

>Long story short, "length" introduces a keyword 
>through the back door, effectively making any use of "length" anywhere 
>unrecommended and highly fragile.

I've always had a strong feeling that all-lowercase words should be
reserved as potential future keywords anyway, barring a few special
cases like 'i'.

I suppose a lot of that comes down to style, though. If you have a
convention where most identifiers start with a capital (excluding
prefixes like 'l_', 'p_' or 'm_'), that only really leaves common
short non-descriptive names like 'i' as a special case.

It's one of the things that bugs me about the normal Java style - it
allows all-lowercase identifiers (only using capitals as word
separators), which look like potential keywords if you're not too
familiar with Java. Besides, from natural language convention,
capitals should appear at the start of a sentence - having them in the
middle of an sentence-like identifier but not at the start just looks
wrong to me.

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