Growing a Language (applicable to @attribute design)

Jacob Carlborg doob at me.com
Tue Nov 13 23:30:55 PST 2012


On 2012-11-14 01:53, Walter Bright wrote:

> Guy says something interesting in there that's applicable to one of our
> current discussions.
>
> Particularly, should we allow:
>
>     @identifier
>
> as a user-defined attribute, in potential conflict with future reserved
> attribute words, or not?
>
> Guy makes the argument that users need to be able to extend the
> vocabulary of a language and have those new words look like built-in
> ones. We have that today, of course, with the ability of defining new
> types. There is no special syntax that says "this is a user-defined
> type, not a keyword."
>
> I think this is a compelling argument, and tips the scales in its favor.
> Probably we've been excessively worried about the problems of adding a
> new builtin attribute type.

Thank you for finally realizing. It's the same reason why we have 
operator overloading, we want user defined types to look like built in 
types.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg


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