Type Qualifiers and Wild Cards

[Brad Anderson]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 4:20 PM, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>wrote:

> 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.
>

I've always thought "defenestrate" should have been used as a keyword
instead of the more general "throw".
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