Uniform Function Call Syntax?

Chris Wright via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon Mar 7 10:57:03 PST 2016


On Mon, 07 Mar 2016 18:45:34 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> On Monday, 7 March 2016 at 18:35:44 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
>> The partial integral symbol is not a letter or digit under any
>> circumstances. It is a mathematical symbol. Identifiers cannot contain
>> mathematical symbols in D or C99 or even C#.
> 
> Well, but that argument is kinda bogus. Scientists have "invented" their
> own notation using whatever symbols (characters)
> they had access to since forever. It's not like they will stop just
> because language designers are reactionary. :-)

It's still not inconsistent to disallow math symbols. There's a simple 
rule that the C99 standards writers were attempting to approximate, and 
that simple rule excludes mathematical symbols.

You dislike and disagree with that decision, which is a separate 
complaint. I'm sympathetic to the language designers here: I want to 
guide people toward using descriptive names, because that makes it easier 
to read code, which makes it easier to verify correctness. Math notation 
tends to be very compact and inscrutable, and I don't want to encourage 
users of my language to use inscrutable identifiers.


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