DIP 1028---Make @safe the Default---Community Review Round 1

[Manu]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 2:30 PM Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/3/2020 5:43 AM, Manu wrote:
> > FWIW, I'm not emotional about this, but it seems like a really good
> > opportunity to change @system to @unsafe, since @system appears almost
> > nowhere in existing code (because is default).
> > 'system' is a weird name for 'unsafe'. I've had lots of colleagues
> > tell me they think it doesn't make sense... and I agree. It's a silly
> > name, and defies the industries established terminology for no reason.
> > We have exactly one opportunity to correct this, and this is it.
>
> Andrei and I talked about this for a while before coming up with 'system'. We
> both felt that calling it 'unsafe' had undeserved negative connotations.

Okay.

Well all feedback I've received is that it fails at the rule of least
surprise. Definitely not intuitive what it means.
I think it may be possible to see and consider the situation
differently when looking from a safe-by-default perspective; today
where 'system' is default, you wouldn't want to advertise the language
as "unsafe by default"... but if safe is default, than 'unsafe' feels
a lot more reasonable for the exceptions. I reckon the change in
default may change your judgement that you describe above.