The Wrong Stuff

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sun Sep 26 01:18:15 PDT 2010


On Sunday 26 September 2010 00:56:32 Don wrote:
> I was just referring to the "without having to add new keywords" bit.
> And a fairly general comment to the whole thread (not just this post). I
> meant that __keywords are available, and the argument that @ provides a
> namespace for keywords is completely wrong, and utterly dreadful. I'm a
> bit disturbed that people are even thinking in that way.

Well, considering the small list of attributes that we currently have and that 
there is nothing to really distinguish semantically whether something is a 
keyword or attribute, they really do come across as a way to add keywords 
without adding keywords. pure could be @pure. @property could be property. This 
was debated previously with regards to what should and shouldn't be an 
attribute, and in the end, it seems entirely arbitrary.

This is completely different from attributes in Java (I don't know about C++0x - 
I didn't even know that it had attributes; I really should study up on it one of 
these days soon). If we allowed user-defined attributes, then the nature of 
attributes in general would be very different from being keywords which aren't 
keywords, but as it stands, that's pretty much what they are. I totally agree 
that that's not what attributes should be, but right now, as far as I can tell, 
that's what they are.

- Jonathan M Davis


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