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

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

KennyTM~ wrote:
> Gide Nwawudu wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Oct 2008 11:51:23 -0400, "Steven Schveighoffer"
>> <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> "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
>> The IDE/editor highlights the guillemets in a differnet colour,
>> because unlike brackets, this is easily done without affecting other
>> expressions. It does look ok.
>>
>> Gide
> 
> What if I want to program in notepad.exe?

No highlight of course but I was surprised that Notepad displayed the 
guillemets properly.

Andrei