DIP 1003 Formal Review

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 04:17:03PM +0000, Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> The first stage of the formal review for DIP 1003 [1], "Remove body as
> a Keyword", is now underway. From now until 11:59 PM ET on May 26
> (3:59 AM GMT on May 27), the community has the opportunity to provide
> last-minute feedback. If you missed the preliminary review [2], this
> is your chance to provide input.
> 
> At the end of the feedback period, I will submit the DIP to Walter and
> Andrei for their final decision. Thanks in advance to those of you who
> participate.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/fbb797f61ac92300eda1d63202157cd2a30ba555/DIPs/DIP1003.md
> 
> [2] http://forum.dlang.org/thread/qgxvrbxrvkxtimzvnetu@forum.dlang.org

I vote for Option 3: make `body` an optional keyword for a release, then
deprecate it for another release, then Kill It With Fire. I completely
agree with the rationale stated in the DIP, that `body` is a commonly
used identifier and therefore should not be a keyword; but even more so
that `body` serves little purpose in the language because it is used
only in *one* context, and in that context it's not even strictly
necessary as no grammar ambiguity would arise from removing it.

I disagree that `function` is not overloaded: it *will* be overloaded if
option 2 is chosen, because `function` currently means function
*pointer*, not the function body itself.  For this reason, I oppose
Option 2.

I also dislike option 1 because contextual keywords represent
incongruity in the language, and lately I've come to the conclusion that
incongruities will ultimately become inhibitors of progress and sources
of problems. (There is more to it than that, but this subject in its
generality is OT here so I'll just leave it at that.)  Furthermore, as
I've said, `body` is not even necessary in the single, only context in
which it's used.  It does not serve to disambiguate anything, because no
grammar ambiguity would result from its absence.  So I regard it
something completely redundant that the language would do better
without.

Even though option 3 entails eventual code breakage, I for one would
welcome that because it would reduce the amount of unnecessary syntax in
my code.

A possible compromise could be to make `body` both contextual and
optional, so that no existing code will break, but new code also can be
freed from the unnecessary syntactic noise and the identifier `body` can
be freed up for user use.


T

-- 
People say I'm indecisive, but I'm not sure about that. -- YHL, CONLANG