śr., 22 wrz 2021 o 09:42 Ville Voutilainen via Liaison <
liaison_at_[hidden]> napisał(a):

> On Wed, 22 Sept 2021 at 00:02, Jens Maurer via Liaison
> <liaison_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > (Personally, I think contracts should be a first-level
> > language feature that should not be hidden inside an
> > attribute-looking syntax atrocity. At least in C++,
> > the space where they are does allow for context-sensitive
> > keywords without much hassle; cf. override and final.)
>
> Well, yeah.. if we were to entertain a contract declaration preceding
> the decl-specifier,
> so that it could do forward-lookup for the parameters, then the case
> for an attribute-like
> syntax would be relatively strong. If the contract declaration has to
> appear where context-sensitive
> keywords appear, then why not use a context-sensitive keyword?
>

The current contracts proposal (P2388R2
<http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2021/p2388r2.html>) as
well as C++20 contracts offer(ed) three new annotations:
 * preconditions and postconditions that appear in function declarations,
 * an assertion that appears in the function body.

This third kind is in the position of a regular statement inside a block
scope, so a context-sensitive keyword will not work; unless we were to drop
these assertions or treat them in a different, irregular way.
Also a natural future extension of the currently proposed contracts is
class invariants, which would also appear as a declaration in class-scope,
so no room for context-sensitive keywords.

Regards,
&rzej;