shouting versus dotting

[Sean Kelly]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> "Walter Bright" wrote
>>> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>>> It's very alarming to me that something like this just has no 
>>>> problem getting in the language without community feedback.
>>> It's there at the moment so we can look at it and see if we like it. 
>>> I know Andrei likes it. Anyhow, this is the opportunity for community 
>>> feedback.
>>
>> Well, here is my feedback.
>>
>> First, I hate it when D has two ways of doing something.  For example, 
>> C style array declarations, or function pointers.  But those have good 
>> reasons.  We want the new style because it's unambiguous and 
>> context-free, but we want the old style to allow easy porting of C code.
> 
> I agree that D should not gratuitously define two ways of doing something.
> 
>> But this change has no qualities I can see except that Andrei thinks 
>> it looks better (at least, that's the only reason he's given).
> 
> Believes, not thinks :o).
> 
>> There are not compatibility issues with C or some other language, it's 
>> just a new syntax that looks different.  Are there problems with the 
>> original !()?  Please give a reason for this addition besides 
>> asthetics, and then we can discuss the merits.  Or if the community 
>> overwhelmingly loves this new syntax, I guess that's a good reason.  
>> Otherwise, I think it should be rejected on the simple principle of 
>> not fixing things that aren't broken.
> 
> There are no objective differences, only the subjective arguments I 
> brought based on linguistic conotations of "!". And actually I didn't 
> come up with that argument - it literally came to me. Word followed by 
> exclamation mark. Our brains are wired to interpret that as an 
> exclamation. If it's frequent enough in code, it becomes really jarring.

I like the use of '!' specifically for its linguistic connotation.  It 
communicates to me that what's happening isn't normal run-time stuff.

> The one way to figure whether you'd aesthetically like something or not 
> is to try it on some code. Unfortunately, that's not yet possible until 
> the next release (Walter was kind enough to send me an alpha for a test 
> drive). So my only request is kindly please hold off judgment until you 
> can play with the notation and see how you feel.

Will do.  It's easy enough to search-replace '!' with '.'


Sean