Greg Ewing:
Greg Wilson <gvwilson@nevex.com>:
Pragmas are a way to embed programs for the parser in the file being parsed.
I hope the BDFL has the good sense to run screaming from anything that has the word "pragma" in it. As this discussion demonstrates, it's far too fuzzy and open-ended a concept -- nobody can agree on what sort of thing a pragma is supposed to be.
It is a good idea, however, to claim a piece of syntactic turf as early as possible so that if/when it is needed, it is unlikely to cause problems with previously written code. My preference would be to introduce a reserved word 'directive' for future expansion here. 'pragma' has connotations of 'ignorable compiler hint' but most of the proposed compiler directives will cause incorrect behaviour if ignored. Neil