Type Qualifiers and Wild Cards

[Walter Bright]

On 11/8/2011 9:37 AM, Gor Gyolchanyan wrote:
> Polluting keyword space is not a good idea unless it's impossible to
> interfere with identifiers.
> If keywords used a special syntax, like starting with a special
> character, then this wouldn't be an issue


The whole "too many keywords" issue strikes me as strange. English has over a 
million words in it. Who cares if a language uses 80 or 100 of them? What 
difference can it possibly make? How can an extra 20 words pollute the million 
word namespace (and not including any non-word identifiers (like inout))?

Another silly aspect of this issue is all keywords could be replaced by a 
sequence of special characters. For example, we could replace inout with ##. 
Voila! Less keywords! But is that better?

Keywords exist to make the language more readable. That's why we use inout 
instead of ##, and it's why we use + instead of add.

D is a rich language. That means it's going to have more syntax, more keywords 
and more symbols.