Attribute syntax to follow programming language trends. about reason HOT 3 CLOSED

My impression from very little experience with OCaml attributes is that
the preceding versus following choice was made in the right way for the
OCaml uses. For polytypic things like defining pretty printers and
comparison functions, it seems that the type definition preceding
attributes makes much more sense. Most of the uses of attributes I have
seen in C# were essentially lint suppression, and so short compared to
C#'s verbose type definitions.

On 26 Dec 2015, at 12:00, Jordan W wrote:

Rust chose to make their "attributes" syntax follow that of C#.

It turns out that OCaml has recently added attributes (they're really
good - they are intended to be used for more powerful features than
Rust's attributes (full on macro/AST rewriting)), and they have their
own syntax. It would be trivial to change the syntax of Reason's
attributes to match that of C# and (now) Rust:

In OCaml

• [@attribute] applies to an inline syntactic construct
  (typically).
• [@@attribute] applies to the preceding syntactic construct such
  as module item, class item.
• [@@@attribute] applies to the containing syntactic construct.

In Rust,

• #[attribute] applies to the following syntactic construct.
• #![attribute] applies to the containing syntactic construct.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference.html#attributes

This is another one of those things that really doesn't matter to most
of us, but why not change it since it's trivial? (I don't have any
code that uses attributes, and I believe none of us do either, so this
is lower pri).

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#27

from reason.

I agree.

from reason.

I'll close this particular suggestion.

from reason.