accept @pure @nothrow @return attributes

[Foo via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 26 January 2015 at 16:10:53 UTC, Jonathan Marler wrote:
> I agree with Jonathan's points, this solution doesn't seem like 
> an improvement.   If I understand the problem, we don't want to 
> make every attribute use the '@' symbol because it looks bad 
> and would cause a lot of code changes for sake of consistency.  
> However, on the other hand, we don't want to support the new 
> properties because we have to add them as keywords which would 
> break code using those words and would make the language more 
> restrictive (nothing can be named nogc/safe/...).
>
> Assuming I understand the problem, couldn't we modify the 
> language grammar to support more attributes without making them 
> keywords?  Then we can omit the '@' on future code (and fix the 
> old code if we want) and we don't have to litter the language 
> with new keywords.
>
> I understand that doing this may be fairly complicated.  This 
> may create some ambiguities in the grammar that would need to 
> be handled carefully, but if it can work I think this would be 
> a good option.

You could do the same as C++ with override and final: they are 
only valid attributes if they appear _after_ the function/method. 
Elsewhere they are still valid as identifiers for e.g. variables.