[burntsushi]

I find the don't-consider-syntax-highlighting-at-all argument odd. It's like arguing traffic lights shouldn't use colors to indicate stop-and-go because some people either cannot perceive the color difference or choose to wear glasses that negate the color difference.

(Analogies here suck. Instead, consider that the vast majority of programmers read code that has been syntax highlighted. To completely discount that experience at all would be odd.)

[kbenson]

> It's like arguing traffic lights shouldn't use colors to indicate stop-and-go because some people either cannot perceive the color difference or choose to wear glasses that negate the color difference.

There is a reason that we have three separate lights still instead of one (that is, there's more reasons than just inertia), and that's because some people can't tell the color differences. Specifically, my father can't easily tell the color difference between green and yellow. I've had friends that also had this problem. It's not uncommon.

> To completely discount that experience at all would be odd

I'm not saying to discount it entirely, but consider it in context. I think it's a somewhat elitist argument, because it assumes everyone both has syntax highlighting set up and that their highlighting will work as well as yours.

I accept that syntax highlighting helps, and is a positive if it can be applied well to a solution, I just think it's far from sufficient.

Put another way, an optional, environment specific configuration setting is not sufficient to offset the negative aspects of an official language level feature, if we're able to weigh things prior to being implemented.

If Rust were required (or even officially expected) to be written in an environment where that was always available and easily configurable, I would think different. E.g. if we're talking about Visual Basic, or Smalltalk with it's IDE (IIRC, not that I have experience with it), then I would think different, but as long as the Rust compiler is expected to take in files of text and not some rich format that includes extra metadata, I don't think language design choices should weigh non-text considerations too heavily.

[burntsushi]

> but consider it in context

Which is exactly what has been done. So I don't understand what you're complaining about. The rest of your comment is a giant straw man. I've never heard of or seen implied that anyone in any decision making position in the Rust project is "assuming everyone has syntax highlighting set up."

When you make ridiculous assumptions about the decision procedures of other people, then it's easy to derive ridiculous conclusions. But reality is always more nuanced than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20031706

[kbenson]

I never made an argument about the Rust project assuming that. I'm talking about people using the availability syntax highlighting to dismiss a negative aspect of a possible choice. I was making that argument in general, but spurred by a specific comment here. I used the context of the Rust community discussion as an example, but never did I assume Rust was using this as a metric (just noting that it has been put forth in arguments from the community).

My argument at this point (as illustrated by the Rust discussion) is simply:

- Rust/rustc takes in unicode text as source

- Since it has no knowledge at the source level of syntax highlighting, using that to mitigate the downside of a language level syntax for a feature is problematic

- We as the public should keep that in mind when discussing the relative merits of one possible implementation or another of a feature.

That's not denigrating or assuming Rust actually did this, it's a note about the community level discussion and how some people approached it, as evidenced by a very specific comment in this thread, and how I thought it had some problems when applied to language level decisions.

[burntsushi]

All someone said was "Await is a keyword, syntax highlighters will most likely paint it differently." Which is a perfectly cromulent thing to say, and isn't contradictory of anything you're saying. Now if someone said, "it's impossible to read the await keyword due to its placement, but since everyone uses syntax highlighting, it will be okay since it will be colored differently," then you'd have a point.

I guess I'm just so tired of folks piping up with the "not everyone uses syntax highlighting" crap almost every single time anyone even hints at the notion that syntax highlighting can help a particular piece of syntax. I guess you're probably tired of the opposite.

[kbenson]

> All someone said was "Await is a keyword, syntax highlighters will most likely paint it differently."

Which was in response to someone's criticism regarding .await notation that "it's easy to not even be aware it exists and think a struct had a member called await instead..."

> Now if someone said, "it's impossible to read the await keyword due to its placement, but since everyone uses syntax highlighting, it will be okay since it will be colored differently,"

That's how I interpreted it based on it being a reply to that exact criticism.

> I guess I'm just so tired of folks piping up with the "not everyone uses syntax highlighting" crap almost every single time anyone even hints at the notion that syntax highlighting can help a particular piece of syntax. I guess you're probably tired of the opposite.

I understand! As I noted earlier, I'm for syntax highlighting in general. If I was forced to never use syntax highlighting for programming again, I might consider a career change and only programming on things I really care about instead of to pay the bills. It's because of this extreme distaste for how annoying it is without syntax highlighting that I'm extremely adverse to making it any worse than it already is, because there's been a few times where I've been forced to endure it.

For the record, I'm fine with the currently accepted await syntax. Out of what I would consider the ideal outcome to me (postfixing special sigil/character), it's at least postfixed. While prefixing await looks prettier in the singular case, it makes any sort of chaining cumbersome and error prone to parse out by eye, and as I've gone to pains to represent here, when it comes to functionality and prettiness, I error heavily on the side of functionality (where functionality includes safety and a premium on not making complex things harder to deal with than they need to be). My comments are really a tangent on the submission topic and not meant to be applied directly towards the specific solution Rust has gone with (there's a reason I waited until quite deep in the thread to use it specifically as an example). That is, .await is a perfectly acceptable outcome in my eyes without the need to justify it through syntax highlighting.

[burntsushi]

Aye, cheers. Understandable!

[pjmlp]

Given that my first syntax highlighting experience was Turbo Pascal 7.0 for MS-DOS, it always feels odd to see it disabled.

And we aren't in the late 70's anymore, where languages had design decisions (keywords always caps) due to printing limitations.