Annotations, was Re: Custom attributes C#

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Daniel Keep wrote:

> The point is to give programmers a way of adding extra information about
> a declaration that you wouldn't normally be able to convey.
> 
> Granted, you *could* do this in D right now; in much the same way you
> can do OO programming in assembler.  You could probably fake it with
> variadic templates and structs, etc., but it'd be ugly as heck.

Makes me think that maybe e.g. 'unittest', 'deprecated' and pragma should
have been annotations instead of keywords. Annotations feel a much more
extensible facility than a fixed set of keywords. I'm not really sure what
benefits the C# syntax has over @java @annotations, but D (or at least
tools) could really have a use for annotations in general. The language
should not dictate what 3rd party tools can and cannot do.