A rationale for pure nothrow ---> @pure @nothrow (and nothing else changes)

[Leandro Lucarella]

Don, el 25 de febrero a las 03:32 me escribiste:
> We'll need compile-time reflection for all attributes. This can lead
> us to a rationale for which attributes are keywords, and which are
> @attributes.
> 
> For @ attributes, we can have a syntax vaguely like:
> __traits(hasAttribute, "safe", foo);
> The details aren't important, but it seems clear that we'll need
> some such thing.
> 
> Anything which isn't an @ attribute will need to have its own traits
> support. We want to minimize the number of such special cases.
> 
> Here are some rules.
> 
> * If it exists as a keyword in C++, it is not an @attribute.
> * hasAttribute is never used for identifying conditional compilation.
> * If accessing it via a standard hasAttribute syntax will reduce the
> number of reflection special cases, it should have an @ prefix.
> 
> Note that some attributes, though not keywords in C++, are
> intimately tied to other features which are C++ keywords. So the
> combination of rule 1 + rule 3 stops them from being @ attributes.
> 
> I know these rules are a little ad-hoc, and aren't as unambiguous as
> we might hope, but I think they do give us the consequences that we
> want. Importantly, it lets @property continue as an attribute.

I think this is really silly. Inventing a set of wicked rules just to
match an arbitrary decision is really worse than accepting that arbitrary
decision per se. Now you have to remember some complicated rules to try to
make sense of something that doesn't make sense in the first place.

The only rule that makes a little sense for me is 2), but I don't even
agree with the deprecated case, deprecated is both version(deprecated)
*and* issuing a warning, and gives you information about the function that
you might want to know via reflection.

If you want safe, trusted, system, property, pure and nothrow as
attributes but not private, protected, public, package and deprecated,
I think it's better to say that than inventing some weird ad-hoc rules.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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