Good, now invent a keyword for variables you don’t want to declare the type. And now that you have a mix of keywords and identifiers on the same place, you can never update your language again.
Also, make the function declarations not use a keyword too, so you get the full C-style madness of code that changes meaning depending on what libraries you import.
I don’t understand how not using a keyword to define a function causes the meaning to change depending on imports. I’ve never run into an issue like that before. Can you give an example?
So I think it’s still probably unclear to people why “mix of keywords and identifiers” is bad: it means any new keyword could break backwards compatibility because someone could have already named a type the same thing as that new keyword.
This syntax puts type identifiers in the very prominent position of “generic fresh statement after semicolon or newline”
…though I’ve spent like 10 minutes thinking about this and now it’s again not making sense to me. Isn’t the very common plain “already_existing_variable = 5” also causing the same problem? We’d have to go back to cobol style “SET foo = 5” for everything to actually make it not an issue
Ah I was misunderstanding the problem. And learned something new about C#, seems in order to avoid breaking existing code they introduce “contextual keywords” var being added later, it is a contextual. You can create a class ‘var’ and the compiler will prefer it.
Swift also uses backticks and Rust has a dumb one in the form of r#thekeyword. Still much better than introducing a async as a new keyword in a minor version of a language and breaking a bunch of libraries.
any new keyword could break backwards compatibility
Wouldn’t that happen anyway with variable and function names? Any type other than primitive/built in ones are usually camel case so lower case keywords are more likely to clash with single word variable and function names, unless you restrict the cases of those too or allow keyword overriding or something.
Yeah, it’s in my edit I realized the same thing. I’m thinking it doesn’t actually really make sense and the real reason is more “the specific way C does it causes a lot of problems so we’re not poking syntax like that with a 10 foot pole” + “it makes writing the parser easier” + maybe a bit of “it makes grepping easier”
One thing that annoyed me about C# as a Java guy is that it really wants you to use camel case for function and property names, even private ones. I don’t like it specifically because it’s hard to differentiate between a function/property and a type.
But C# has quite a few keywords and seem to like adding them more than Java.
Maybe that’s their way of ensuring keywords don’t clash with stuff?
Good, now invent a keyword for variables you don’t want to declare the type. And now that you have a mix of keywords and identifiers on the same place, you can never update your language again.
Also, make the function declarations not use a keyword too, so you get the full C-style madness of code that changes meaning depending on what libraries you import.
I don’t understand how not using a keyword to define a function causes the meaning to change depending on imports. I’ve never run into an issue like that before. Can you give an example?
Some declarations terminate on the name, other declarations go one requiring more tokens. In C, the only thing that differentiates them is the type.
Parenthesis in particular are completely ambiguous. But asterisks and square brackets also create problems.
I have never heard of this problem for C. Can you elaborate or point to some articles?
In C#, you can use ‘var’ to have an impilict type variable.
String name = “”
var name = “”
So, a keyword
So I think it’s still probably unclear to people why “mix of keywords and identifiers” is bad: it means any new keyword could break backwards compatibility because someone could have already named a type the same thing as that new keyword.
This syntax puts type identifiers in the very prominent position of “generic fresh statement after semicolon or newline”
…though I’ve spent like 10 minutes thinking about this and now it’s again not making sense to me. Isn’t the very common plain “already_existing_variable = 5” also causing the same problem? We’d have to go back to cobol style “SET foo = 5” for everything to actually make it not an issue
Ah I was misunderstanding the problem. And learned something new about C#, seems in order to avoid breaking existing code they introduce “contextual keywords” var being added later, it is a contextual. You can create a class ‘var’ and the compiler will prefer it.
At least in C#, you can define variables with keyword names like this:
var @struct = “abc”
I think in Kotlin you can do the same, and even include spaces with backticks like val
abstract class= “abc”I’m not sure if other languages allow that, regardless it should be rarely used.
Swift also uses backticks and Rust has a dumb one in the form of
r#thekeyword. Still much better than introducing aasyncas a new keyword in a minor version of a language and breaking a bunch of libraries.Python?
Wouldn’t that happen anyway with variable and function names? Any type other than primitive/built in ones are usually camel case so lower case keywords are more likely to clash with single word variable and function names, unless you restrict the cases of those too or allow keyword overriding or something.
Yeah, it’s in my edit I realized the same thing. I’m thinking it doesn’t actually really make sense and the real reason is more “the specific way C does it causes a lot of problems so we’re not poking syntax like that with a 10 foot pole” + “it makes writing the parser easier” + maybe a bit of “it makes grepping easier”
One thing that annoyed me about C# as a Java guy is that it really wants you to use camel case for function and property names, even private ones. I don’t like it specifically because it’s hard to differentiate between a function/property and a type.
But C# has quite a few keywords and seem to like adding them more than Java.
Maybe that’s their way of ensuring keywords don’t clash with stuff?
auto. Also in D, you only needconstif you don’t want to specify a type for a constant, the compiler automatically inferres it to you.Function declarations can be easily decyphered from context, no problem.
Maybe that’s what the people developing spoken languages thought, while normalising conversations overdependent on context.
But hey, now we have another comedic tool in anime.