• Michael (1/1) Jun 02 2013 Why pure is keyword, but @safe is attribute?
• Jonathan M Davis (12/13) Jun 02 2013 They're both function attributes. But pure is a keyword and safe got @ t...

"Michael" <pr m1xa.com> writes:

Why pure is keyword, but  safe is attribute?

Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg gmx.com> writes:

On Sunday, June 02, 2013 10:52:14 Michael wrote:
 Why pure is keyword, but  safe is attribute?

They're both function attributes. But pure is a keyword and safe got   tacked 
onto the front of it in order to avoid having to create a new keyword. Now, we 
have User Defined Attributes which also use  , but that doesn't really have 
anything to do with  safe or any of the other function attributes which start 
with   save for the fact that a UDA obviously can't have the same name.  safe 
could have just as easily been safe, and pure could just as easily have been 
 pure. But it was arbitrarily chosen that pure didn't have   and  safe did. I 
believe that it's at least partially based on when they were added to the 
language, but it's ultimately arbitrary, and the fact that  safe starts with   
means nothing.

- Jonathan M Davis