One comment that comes up over and over is "Why did you chose ? It looks !" So, how do we come up with new syntax?
We put all the options up on a dart board and throw darts at them blindfolded.
Seriously.
OK, not seriously. But sometimes it seems that way. You see, I'd like to pretend here that we have some formal intellectual process that allows us to arrive at the ideal syntax 100% of the time with complete accuracy. But the sad fact of the matter is that syntax, for better or for worse, is largely a matter of personal preference. Show the same syntax to 10 different people, and you're going to get 10 different opinions. In the end, it almost comes down to just picking a damn syntax and sticking with it no matter what.
This isn't to say that there aren't considerations that come into play when thinking about syntax. Reusing characters already used in another context is not something that shouldn't be done lightly. The availability of keys on the majority of keyboards in the world is another consideration. (Our test lead took to joking for a while that we should use the euro character for something, just to give the Europeans a leg up on the Americans for once.) And the number of characters in a keyword is a real consideration. I personally have some regrets about the length of some of the keywords that we chose for inheritance, for example.
But in the end, it comes down to aesthetics and that is totally a personal thing. The bitshift operators are an excellent example of this: when we first discussed them in the VS 2002 timeframe, we ended up having to table the whole feature because none of us could agree on whether we should choose <<, Shl, BitShl, ShiftTheValueLeftTheFollowingNumberOfBits, etc. We would have ended up cutting the feature because of time anyway, but it's an instructive example.
The problem with something like choosing a bitshift operator is that everyone's cultural context comes into play. For people familiar with C++, choosing << and >> seems natural because that's what they're used to. For people familiar with assembly, Shl and Shr might seem more natural. But given that VB has never had them, what to choose? Even looking at the issue of "word vs character" doesn't help here, because even though we do have a tradition of using words for operators ("Mod"), we also have a tradition of using obscure characters for operators, too ("^"). In the end, my view was that the fact that << and >> visually encoded some indication of their function made them slightly preferable over Shl and Shr, which seemed a bit cryptic to my eyes.
My view eventually prevailed, by the way, because everybody else who disagreed with me left the team in the interim. Victory by attrition. But that just emphasizes the personal nature of the choice. In the end, I think it's more of an artistic decision than a technical decision - less "how strong does this beam need to be to hold this ceiling up?" and more "what color should we paint the bedroom?"
Which doesn't mean that we don't agonize endlessly over what the right syntax is for something. The generics syntax is an excellent example of this, and deserves an entry of it's own in the near future.
Original URL: http://panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/03/09/287.aspx