DIP64: Attribute Cleanup

[Brian Schott via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 21 June 2014 at 19:41:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> And to add to that, this proposal doesn't even make things 
> consistent. You
> _still_ have to explain why some attributes have @ and some 
> don't. It's just
> that now two of them have @ whereas they didn't before. final, 
> static, public,
> const, etc. all still don't have @, and they're all function 
> attributes too.

I think the proposal said that the type constructors would be 
exempt, You wouldn't have @const but you would have @final.

> So, it doesn't increase consistency. It just moves it around. 
> And then we have
> to explain why some older code or tutorials _don't_ have @ on 
> pure or nothrow,
> making it so that we have _more_ to explain.

We can either say "It used to be inconsistent, but then we did 
nothing", or "It used to be inconsistent, but then we fixed it. 
Run this tool on your code and you'll be fine."

> I appreciate the sentiment of wanting to clean things up and 
> make them more
> consistent, but I really don't think this does that. If we want 
> that, we'd
> either have to add @ to all attributes or remove it from all 
> attributes. But
> then of course, we'd have stuff like @public and @static, which 
> is
> inconsistent with other languages and would probably cause 
> folks to complain
> about unnecessary inconsistencies with othe languages. So, I 
> really don't
> think that we can avoid this problem. It's just a question of 
> which form of it
> we want to deal with and how much code breakage we're willing 
> to put up with
> to get it there.

Why is D being consistent with other languages a more important 
goal than D being consistent with D?