foo!(bar) ==> foo{bar}

[Steven Schveighoffer]

"Gide Nwawudu" wrote
> On Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:12:31 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>
>>Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Tomas Lindquist Olsen wrote:
>>>> I just think it's funny that this has even come up and is getting
>>>> serious consideration. Walter usually don't like changing the color of
>>>> his shed! And D coders are already used to !()
>>>
>>> As Andrei said, I don't write a lot of templates. He does.
>>>
>>> What I'd really like are those funky « and » quote characters. But alas,
>>> few keyboards have them on it. (I inserted them here by cutting and
>>> pasting from somewhere else, hardly very practical. I could modify my
>>> text editor to make it easy, but what about every other ascii text
>>> editor people use?)
>>
>>That's simple. I saw that at work in a nice Smalltalk environment called
>>Squeak. People wrote a <- b and the IDE transformed in real time the
>>"<-" into a nice arrow.
>>
>>The compiler accepts both notations. That way the code looks super nice
>>and (if using Template{arguments}) is also easy to enter. Plus it
>>doesn't look half bad without the embellishment either.
>>
>>
>>Andrei
>
> The current syntax '!()' and guillemets '«»' might be the way to go.
> The good thing about guilements is they can be highlighted in a text
> editor or IDE as a different colour and this makes templates stand
> out, but it is shame that guilements aren't on a UK keyboard.
>
> alias DenseMatrix«num» PulType;
> alias SparseRowsMatrix«num,HashSparseVector» PuuType;
> alias BiMap«uint, Tuple«uint,uint», BiMapOptions.lhDense» DicType;
>
> See it doesn't look too bad.

Maybe its your choice of parameter names, but this looks aboslutely awful :(

Everything runs together, looks like one big word.  I think we need a full 
height character to represent template brackets, something with a lot of 
whitespace to separate it from the other characters.

-Steve