DIP 1012--Attributes--Preliminary Review Round 1

[Jesse Phillips via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 27 July 2017 at 14:44:23 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> DIP 1012 is titled "Attributes".
>
> https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1012.md
> Thanks in advance to all who participate.
>
> Destroy!

My primary points

* Don't formally deprecate the keywords, there is not enough 
justification to ever remove them.
* Remove the whole program defaults, I'm ok with it being changed 
in a re-implementation of the runtime (like the embedded 
example), we just don't need the extra confusion within user code.
* Specifying inferred needs to be within druntime only, and thus 
may not need to exist.
* I'm concerned user defined attributes could define a "defaults" 
for functions.

I think the updated document needs some additional rework, here 
are some examples:

# Rational

A number of issues with the existing functional attribute system 
have come up through the years.

* Certain attributes don't have a name, e.g. All functions 
''throws'' but this is not an existing attribute.
* The default attributes were not correctly chosen, e.g. all 
class methods should be ''final'' unless specified otherwise, and 
because of the first point declaring 'final:' at the top of the 
class cannot be undone.
* AliasSeq is provided to manage Attributes, but it doesn't 
handle built in attributes (I could be wrong but is what I'm 
getting from the document even though it isn't explicitly stated)
* ...

# Description

Function existing attributes and their unnamed counterpart will 
exist as an enum within core.attributes. This module will be 
implicitly imported to provide the symbols without explicit 
import or breaking existing code. The compiler will recognize the 
non-@ based attributes as the corresponding core.attribute.

...

## Implementation Details

----------
module core.attribute;

enum Protection {
system,
safe,
trusted,
}

alias safe = Protection.safe;
...
-----------

The compiler will default functions to the first value of the 
enum [for my example].

[So on and so forth]