Type Qualifiers and Wild Cards

deadalnix deadalnix at gmail.com
Wed Nov 9 07:29:50 PST 2011


> 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.

Well, using inout contradict this argument. inout isn't reminding in any 
way of its functionnality. It is more readable than ##, for sure, but 
way less than any word from const/immutable lexical field.


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