[ ArgumentList ] vs. @( ArgumentList )

[Jonas Drewsen]

On Wednesday, 7 November 2012 at 09:23:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 07, 2012 10:13:47 Jonas Drewsen wrote:
>> My vote goes to @(a,b,c) and @a @b @c.
>> 
>> I never understood why some builtin storage class keywords 
>> have @
>> in front of them (e.g. @property, @safe, @disable) and some 
>> don't
>> (e.g. pure, nothrow).
>> 
>> IMHO the cleanest design would be to have builtins as plain
>> keywords (ie. no @ in front). And then @xxx is reserved for 
>> UDA.
>> 
>> I understand that this would be a breaking change and not 
>> likely
>> to happen - just want to know the reasoning behind it.
>
> It mainly came down to not wanting to add new keywords. By 
> using @safe instead
> of safe, safe could still be used as a variable or function or 
> whatnot. There
> was some discussion of which should have @ on them on which not 
> (e.g. nothrow
> vs @nothrow was debated), but the decision was fairly 
> arbitrary. If anything
> though, had we not cared about breaking code or whether D 
> looked similar to
> other languages, we probably would have made _all_ attributes 
> start with @
> (including stuff like @public). It would have been wonderfully 
> consistent that
> way, but it wasn't ultimately deemed a good idea.
>
> So, basically, @ was introduced to avoid adding more keywords. 
> It certainly
> makes sense to extend it for using with user defined 
> attributes, but that
> wasn't really the original intention.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I we were to allow for @foobar style UDA then "safe" would have 
to be a reserved keyword somehow. Otherwise I do not know what 
this would mean:

struct safe { }
@safe void foobar() { }

/Jonas