Re: "Ignore me" symbol

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

> On Dec 16, 2018, at 5:10 PM, Hugo Musso Gualandi <hgualandi@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> 
> I agree with Dibyendu that annotations (along the lines of what is
> present in Java or perhaps something like Ocaml's ppx annotations)
> might be a better way to support language extensibility than a magic
> backtick character.
> 
> A concern I would have with this is that this novel meaning for
> backticks is unlike any other language and could be confusing and
> unfamiliar. Additionally, it would also make it harder to grep for
> things as there would now be multiple ways to write the same
> identifiers.
> 
> 

Having worked on large Java codebases that make extensive use of annotations I can say it was NOT a nice experience. You end up with so many annotations and so little Java that the whole looks more like assembly language (and a bad one at that). Yuck.

—Tim