if(;){} opinion

[Walter Bright]

"Derek Parnell" <derek at psych.ward> wrote in message 
news:op.s5olyeuu6b8z09 at ginger.vic.bigpond.net.au...
> Language Bigot! <G>

I plead guilty as charged.

> Seriously though ... who cares if its a C thingy! This is NOT C.

It is a C derived language, and is meant to be an upgrade path for C users. 
Hence, gratuitous incompatibility is not a good idea. To diverge a 
particular feature from C, one needs a better reason than just liking a 
different spelling.

> But you  already know that. Just because C does 'X' is it good enough to 
> justify  keeping 'X'? You've already changed lots of other things to 
> achieve a  better, consistent, language - so why stop at this wart.
>
> 'auto', as a word, is too ambiguous to because it is an adjective that can 
> apply to many things. Ok, so C applys it to automatic stack allocation and 
> so does D, but D also applies it to automatic type-casting too. Why do you 
> want your language to be ridiculed for this wart when it is so easy to 
> change it. If you are too frightened of it being a Pascal-looking language 
> (and 'var' will not do that, BTW), then pick some other more meaningful 
> word.

It isn't ambigous since it doesn't really imply type inference - all it does 
is enable the parser to disambiguate an expression from a declaration:

    a = 3;        // declaration of 'a' with implicit typing? Or assign to 
'a'?
    auto a = 3;    // ahh, now I know it's a declaration
    static a = 3;    // that's a declaration with implicit typing as well