[Development] A modest proposal: disable lower-case keywords (emit, foreach, forever, signals, slots) by default

[Ville Voutilainen]

On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 at 22:11, André Pönitz <apoenitz at t-online.de> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 04:02:04PM +0200, Ville Voutilainen wrote:
> > > I, for one, definitely want to see whether I am emitting a signal or not.
> >
> > Right; the claims that you can ignore signal emits when looking at a
> > piece of code or expect that they
> > don't affect the current scope are exactly backwards.
>
> Christian is right and your conclusion is wrong.

My conclusion is fine. Your unsubstantiated claims don't make it wrong.

> See the already mentioned example of debugging in code that follows
> the convention of using signals only for inside-out communication:

Buy a debugger that can skip code that you didn't write.

> Emitting the signal may cause all kind of activity on the outside,
> but in first approximation one can assume it doesn't change state in
> the current object. So when drilling down in this situation
> "ignoring" emit is indeed natural.

Seems quite unnatural to me, considering that signal emissions
reasonably often tend to result
in further calls being made to the object.

> > Thanks, Christian - that's the first ever plausible explanation for
> > marking a signal emission.
> This sounds a bit like the committee shot down the proposal to
> not use 'emit' without even bothering to think about reasons why
> there are users of this "nonsense", let alone tried to ask them.

The committee shot down the proposal because
1) there are work-arounds to the problem, and we already use those
work-arounds for similar
issues with boost::signal
2) trying to avoid clashes with lowercase non-function-like macros is
rather difficult
3) the scope of the problem is narrow
4) no existing code is broken