[treyd]

The only calls to change the lifetime syntax have been coming from "outside the house". Rust developers are fine using the ' as the lifetime sigil and there are no calls from within the Rust community to change it. Adding a keyword would increase the verbosity substantially.

[jeroenvlek]

When is someone a Rust developer and why do you assume that I am not one?

edit: -4 points on my parent comment for a totally valid opinion, not violating any commenting guide line (please enlighten me). However, for the down voters: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity."

[nequo]

I don't think that you violated any guidelines. I think that the downvotes for your parent comment are only an expression of disagreement with what you propose. If I can suggest, don't take it personally.

Turning `'` into `lifetime` would make Rust code that needs explicit lifetimes extremely verbose. That would make code harder to keep on the same line, for no added benefit in expressiveness.

Allowing both `'` and `lifetime` in the syntax would make the language more confusing to anyone who is learning it, and it opens up unproductive debates about syntax in code bases if two authors have conflicting preferences.

[jeroenvlek]

Your explanation is appreciated. I naively assumed HN moderation was more meta than that. It boils down to taste, ultimately. I'm really a fan of Rust, and it is sobering to now experience this gatekeeping that the Rust community is often accused of first hand.

Of course, mixing keywords single quotes is confusing, but currently the single quote is also confusing.

Just to illustrate: The keyword could just be called lif, which has the same length as dyn.