Comment by conartist6
Comment by conartist6 17 hours ago
That proposal is a practical joke. You haven't got a language at all if the words don't mean anything.
Comment by conartist6 17 hours ago
That proposal is a practical joke. You haven't got a language at all if the words don't mean anything.
If you allow arbitrary meaningless data in today, you can never add meaning in the future. That's why the reserved words cannot be used. They need to be safe to add meaning to down the line!
It is an approach that has already seen some success in Python. Languages often have constructs that are reserved for future use or that "parse but don't validate". JS has a lot of reserved keywords (thanks to ES4 and ES5, especially) that "don't mean anything" today but could in the future and still parse even though they'll give a runtime error. Beyond that, almost every language has a syntax for comments. Comments don't mean anything to the parser/compiler either, but they mean a lot to the people writing the source files and they still need syntax to write them.