Type Qualifiers and Wild Cards

[Gor Gyolchanyan]

The problem is, that by adding a new keyword we could accidentally
invalidate lots of identifiers.
Everything else is true, i agree :-)

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 3:20 AM, 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.
>