On Mon, 16 Oct 2023 at 11:20, Peter Dimov via SG7 <sg7_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> I used to argue that unknown attributes should be retained in the AST for
> reflection purposes, but that actually doesn't give us much, so I dropped it.
> Annotations work sufficiently differently in that we don't just want the text
> of the unknown attribute, we want the compiler to evaluate the constant
> expression and to retain its result in the AST, not its text.

Ah, and then that other implementation vendor will reiterate to us
that expressions
in attributes are a serious nuisance for their implementation.

So, instead of hastily deeming attributes unsuitable for this purpose,
we might re-entertain
using them, and make sure to specify and agree that there are certain
kinds of attributes
that implementation A is not to toss in the wind, and also certain
attributes that implementation B
should try to separately recognize as having expressions in them,
without necessarily reinventing
the syntax for those things.