accept @pure @nothrow @return attributes

[Jonathan Marler via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 28 January 2015 at 15:37:28 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 15:16:50 via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 28 January 2015 at 15:11:35 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>> wrote:
>> > consistent. They're
>> > always going to be inconsistent in one way or another, even 
>> > if
>> > it's simply
>> > because they don't match what anyone coming from other
>> > languages expects
>>
>> The logical conclusion from that statement would be that D
>> semantics are fundamentally broken...
>
> Not really. For instance, we could make the attributes 
> "completely
> consistent" by adding @ to all of them - @pure, @public, 
> @const, etc. But
> that would cause inconsistencies with other languages that have 
> many of the
> same attributes, and it would likely cause far more complaining 
> than the
> current situation has.
>
> We could also remove @ from all of the attributes, and then 
> that would be
> "completely consistent," because then only UDAs will have @ on 
> them. But the
> next time that we need to add a new attribute (which will 
> hopefully be rare,
> but it happens sometimes - e.g. with @nogc recently), then we'd 
> have to add
> a new keyword to avoid making things inconsistent, which would 
> likely break
> existing code. So, more likely, we'd just tack @ onto it (which 
> can still
> break code, but only UDA-specific code, so the breakage would 
> be far more
> minimal), and we'd be right back where we are now.

Actually we could support removing the '@' symbol from all 
attributes without making them keywords :)  It would be quite 
simple to do (probably a day of work in DMD, in parser.c and a 
couple other places that use the code tree).  At least for the 
attributes on the right side of the function signature.  For the 
attributes on the left-hand side, it may make the syntax 
ambiguous...not sure.  The idea is we allow non-keyword 
identifiers to be used as function attributes (on the right hand 
side).