shouting versus dotting

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> The problem I see with "!" as a template instantiation is not technical. I
> write a fair amount of templated code and over years the "!" did not grow on
> me at all. I was time and again consoled by Walter than one day that will
> happen, but it never did. I also realized that Walter didn't see a problem
> with it because he writes only little template code.
>
> I didn't have much beef with other oddities unique to D. For example, I
> found no problem accommodating binary "~" and I was wondering what makes "!"
> different. I was just looking at a page full of templates and it looked like
> crap.
>
> One morning I woke up with the sudden realization of what the problem was:
> the shouting.
>
> In C, "!" is used as a unary operator. That may seem odd at first, but it
> nevers follows a word so it's tenuous to associate it with the natural
> language "!". In D, binary "!" _always_ follows a word, a name, something
> coming from natural language. So the conotation with exclamation jumps at
> you.
>
> That's why I find the choice of "!" poor. I believe it can impede to some
> extent acquisition of templates by newcomers, and conversely I believe that
> using .() can make templates more palatable. I tried using ".()" in my code
> and in only a couple of days it looked and felt way better to me. Based on
> that experience, I suggest that "!()" is dropped in favor of ".()" for
> template instantiation for D2.
>
> Sean's argument that "The exclamation mark signifies an assertion of sorts"
> is exactly where I'd want templates not to be: they should be blended in,
> not a hiccup from normal code. Serious effort has been, and still is, made
> in D to avoid shell-shocking people about use of templates, and I think
> ".()" would be a good step in that direction.

Long argument short:  I don't mind !() at all, and changing it to .()
seems like a pointless pedanticism.  But since you're the one
suggesting it, there's a very good chance of it getting into the
language (if it hasn't already), so there's not much use arguing
against it.