Function calls

[Craig Black]

"Michel Fortin" <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote in message 
news:hjqdca$2neo$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 2010-01-27 15:54:42 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:
>
>> Now @property is in. That has created (as I had anticipated) the 
>> unresolved issue of choosing between @property or just function for any 
>> given parameterless function. Also I need to litter my code with 
>> @property. To this day I am not sure whether we made the right decision.
>
> Well, perhaps it'd be better if it was 'property' instead of '@property'. 
> I find the distinction between keywords and attributes to be pretty 
> arbitrary, almost illogical.
>
> I'm on the side that attributes (those keywords starting with @) should be 
> reserved to things you can ignore entirely without preventing the program 
> from working. For instance, remove all @safe and @trusted attributes from 
> a program and it still works with no change in behaviour (except for when 
> an error occurs). 'nothrow', 'pure', 'final', 'deprecated' should be 
> attributes; '@property' should be a regular keyword. Protection attributes 
> could be made attributes too since if you remove them all everything still 
> works.
>
> So I think attributes should be reserved to non-essential but useful stuff 
> in the language, generally those things adding restrictions without 
> changing the semantics.

Yes, agreed, there should be some more thought put into how keywords work so 
that things are consistent and make sense.  It seems strange that new 
keywords are preceded by @, but older ones are not.  However, aesthetically, 
I prefer the @ to a double underscore.  Perhaps __gshared could be @gshared 
or even @shared.

-Craig
-Craig