[bitc-dev] FN keyword

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Ben Kloosterman <bklooste at gmail.com> wrote:

>  The issue with an attribute is everyone immediately preferred this at the
> call site which looks pretty awkward for attributes eg
>
> 1)      Why does the writer of the caller need to know ,   shouldn’t the
> compiler be able to work that out .
>
> 2)      Some of these attributes get pretty big  ( eg serialization , IOC
> ).
>
That's one issue. Another issue is that attributes can't be inferred,
because the compiler does not (in general) know anything about their
semantics.

But worse than this: when attributes are used to encode type, we need a way
to attach them to types and print them accordingly. In C#, an attribute
cannot be introduced at a type, only at a type definition. The way you work
around this is by introducing and using a typedef. The associated
information is lost for pretty-printing purposes, exactly because it
*isn't*a type.

>  Im not qualified to give an answer.. but  I can observe  that its very
> annoying in C# ( the black magic we discussed ) of having stack created
> value types , then passing them by ref and out and the system occasionally
> boxing them eg to do a vcall on an interface or because there is a reference
> from the heap.
>
Concur, but that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issues and limitations
of attributes in CLR. Good topic, but not the same topic.

shap
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