Annotation of functions

[Tony]

On Tuesday, 20 February 2018 at 12:15:57 UTC, psychoticRabbit 
wrote:
> I've noticed that Go and Rust annotate functions.
>
> func (in go)
> fn (in rust)
>
> I was kind of wondering why they made that choice, given 
> compilers in many languages do not.
On Tuesday, 20 February 2018 at 12:15:57 UTC, psychoticRabbit 
wrote:
> I've noticed that Go and Rust annotate functions.
>
> func (in go)
> fn (in rust)
>
> I was kind of wondering why they made that choice, given 
> compilers in many languages do not.

I think it is common to have a keyword used in function 
definition - outside the
C-family. The Pascal family has keywords for function and 
procedure declaration, as does Fortran. It looks like Cobol uses 
the "function" keyword for when you call a function and 
"function-id" for when you define it.  Perl, Python and Ruby all 
have a keyword for function definition.

>
> Would this be a useful feature in D?
>
> Everything else seems to have an annotation (e.g structs, 
> classes.) So why not functions?
>
> What are people's thoughts about it?

I think keywords for functions may be to avoid or minimize the 
difficulty C and C++ have with declaring (and deciphering the 
declarations of) function pointers. Seems it also would have 
prevented years of C++ having "the most vexing parse", where a 
class instantiation can be confused with a function declaration.