So I think it’s still probably unclear to people why “mix of keywords and identifiers” is bad: it means any new keyword could break backwards compatibility because someone could have already named a type the same thing as that new keyword.
This syntax puts type identifiers in the very prominent position of “generic fresh statement after semicolon or newline”
…though I’ve spent like 10 minutes thinking about this and now it’s again not making sense to me. Isn’t the very common plain “already_existing_variable = 5” also causing the same problem? We’d have to go back to cobol style “SET foo = 5” for everything to actually make it not an issue
Yeah, it’s in my edit I realized the same thing. I’m thinking it doesn’t actually really make sense and the real reason is more “the specific way C does it causes a lot of problems so we’re not poking syntax like that with a 10 foot pole” + “it makes writing the parser easier” + maybe a bit of “it makes grepping easier”