The Wrong Stuff

[retard]

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 09:26:28 -0400, Michel Fortin wrote:

> On 2010-09-26 03:56:32 -0400, Don <nospam at nospam.com> said:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> People (including me) are thinking that way because there is no sane
> semantic definition of what the @ syntax stands for. I'll grant you one
> thing: @attributes are only used to affect declarations in one way or
> another, so as long as this stands they're more limited in purpose than
> keywords in general. But beyond that, what makes @ different from
> another namespace for keywords?
> 
> 
>> See also the August 28 post by Herb Sutter: http://herbsutter.com/
>> 
>> "My biggest (but not only) beef with C++0x [[attributes]] is that the
>> standard itself was abusing attributes as disguised [[keywords]].
>> Attributes are acceptable as pure annotations, but they should have no
>> semantic effect on the program.
>> [snip]
>> it’s a clear example of adding language keywords dressed in attributes’
>> clothing, and not something I want to be responsible for forcing three
>> million C++ developers to live with until the end of time."
> 
> Unfortunately, one attribute with the @ syntax in D -- and I'd say the
> flagship one as it was the first and most discussed -- is not a pure
> annotation as it has a noticeable effect on semantics. I'm talking about
> @property which, if it ever get implemented, changes your function so it
> simulates a field. In Herb's terms, @property is clearly a keyword in
> disguise.
> 
> And then you realize many keywords fit that same definition of an
> attribute (deprecated, pure, nothrow...) and you're left with a very
> fuzzy concept of what the @ syntax is for. We have an important keyword
> disguised as an @attribute (@property) and attributes disguised as
> keywords for historical reason (deprecated, pure, nothrow...). Whatever
> the @ syntax was supposed to stand for, it's pretty messed up right now.
> 
> There's also confusion about the term "attribute" itself. Try reading
> that page and come with a sane definition of what is an attribute in D.
> <http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/attribute.html>

This just makes me wonder, why is it so *** hard to get things right? I 
remember when D didn't have the @stuff syntax at all. I wished it worked 
like annotations in Java or in C#. If I made my own 3rd party lint/
document_generator/unit_test_tool/whatever, and I'd just want a way to 
decorate some syntax tree nodes. How can it be so hard to do this? Can 
you use your own @annotations now? Probably not. There's only the 
@property syntax, nothing else. The __traits keyword was also supposed to 
change to 'traits' or something a bit more sane. Nothing really happened. 
Why am I using this language?