Why the @ in @safe? & UDAs

[Benjamin Thaut]

Am 07.11.2013 16:55, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
> On Thursday, November 07, 2013 07:07:44 Benjamin Thaut wrote:
>> What about gaining consitency? That was something D1 was really strong
>> in, but D2 lost.
>
> Then should public and private be @public and @private in order to be
> consistent? Then we'd be inconsistent with C++, Java, C# etc. which would make
> it that much harder for folks to learn D. Would you want @static and @const?
>
> I don't think that you can be 100% consistent. If nothing else, as soon as you
> make one thing consistent, it often ends up being inconsistent with something
> else. And sometimes consistency costs us. For instance, this is perfectly
> legal
>
> const Object foo();
>
> and is equivalent to
>
> Object foo() const;
>
> because that's the way it is for every other attribute, but it's a source of
> confusion and bugs, because most everyone seems to expect that
>
> const Object foo();
>
> would be equivalent to
>
> const(Object) foo();
>
> I understand why it would be desirable to try and make all of the attributes
> consistent, and if we were starting from scratch or were fairly early along in
> language development, then I'd be in favor of it. But we're way too far along
> at this point IMHO. The only practical benefit to making such changes now would
> be to try and make the language easier for newcomers - which is a laudible
> goal to be sure, but I don't think that the cost of having to know that it's
> @safe, @trusted, and @system whereas ever other language-defined attribute
> lacks @ is particularly high - particularly when the cost of fixing it is
> breaking pretty much every D program in existence. It's just a small quirk
> that you have to learn, and then it's not really a problem anymore.
>
> The benefits of such a change would be almost purely aesthetic, and it would
> break _everyone_'s code without adding any practical benefit whatsoever.
>
> I'm probably the person who's broken the most code due to making changes to
> Phobos in order to make its symbol names consistent, so I'm definitely in favor
> of making the language and its libraries consistent and see value in that, but
> I think that we're past the point where we can afford such breaking changes
> (and this suggested change would break far more than any change to Phobos ever
> has). We need to be stable, or no one is going to use D. And breaking every D
> program in existence over an aesthetic issue is just going to harm our
> reputation in that regard. We finally seem to be starting to shake off the
> reputation for breaking code that we've had, and our stability continues to
> increase. We don't want to turn around and make such a large breaking change
> for aesthetic reasons. That would not only tick off the majority of our
> existing user base, but it would scare away many of the newbies that this
> change would be supposed to help.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>


Well if you ask me builtin attributes should not have the '@' so that 
only UDAs start with '@'.

I don't think that we are past the point of making breaking changes. the 
D user base it not that big. And those that are here are already used to 
stuff constantly breaking, otherwise they would be gone already. Also no 
one said they should be breaking right away. We can slowly deprecate 
them or at least provide both versions, so there is at least the option 
to make the D code consistent.


-- 
Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut