Special symbols again (was Re: The problem with "as")

[Stephen Horne]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 00:24:34 GMT, Joe Mason <joe at notcharles.ca> wrote:

>Why is the current standard priveleged?  A few years down the road, half
>of the basic functionality of the language will have special symbols in
>front of it, just because it was proposed after an arbitrary date.  The
>symbol wouldn't tell anything about the features it's attached to except
>the relatively uninteresting fact of when they were added to the
>language.
>
>The only use I can see for such information is to mark features which
>require a recent interpreter, and a single otherwise meaningless symbol
>is a particulary ugly way to do it.

I largely agree, though there is one point worth making. This could be
seen as a 'trial feature' system. If the feature catches on and it
annoys people to use an 'extension' syntax, a non-extension syntax
could be added later. Thus features could be added in a standard way
without needing new syntax, kind of testing the waters.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk