Why do some language-defined attributes have @ and some not?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Friday, October 24, 2014 08:19:48 Paolo Invernizzi via Digitalmars-d-learn 
wrote:
> On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 00:37:26 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> > There are people out there using D who do not participate in
> > the newsgroups. Walter has told us before that he gets emails
> > from companies using D in production. He has to deal with
> > complaints about code breakage that we aren't going to see here
> > in the NG. Just keep in mind that no matter how many of us here
> > agree on a breaking change, we are not the entirety of the D
> > user base. And it has nothing to do with Reddit.
>
> I think that Walter talked about emails complaining about "silent
> breakage" or "regressions", and that's a totally different matter.
>
> To be honest, I only remember that he talked about one single
> case, but maybe I'm wrong.
> And I don't remember any complain about code deprecations.

Walter doesn't seem to understand that unintended breakage and planned,
communicated breakage via a proper deprecation process are two totally
different issues. He's definitely had folks complain about regressions, and
the response to that has sometimes been that changes that we were considering
got axed, because he'd just had someone complain about (unintended) code
breakage, and for him, that meant that pretty much _anything_ which would
eventually result in code breakage was bad and therefore raised the bar on
changes that much more (IIRC, that happened just after the virtual keyword had
been introduced, and the result was that it was removed, and the plans to
switch to final by default were axed).

So no, I don't think that folks have complained to him about deprecations
(though they could have, and he just never said anything about it), but they
have complained often enough about other stuff, and he doesn't seem to
distinguish between planned breakage and unintentional breakage in the same
way that many of the rest of us do.

- Jonathan M Davis