Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
Well, assume for the sake of argument that it's relevant. Is it also
valuable enough to justify changing email after 25 years of production
use, with a user base presumably in the hundreds of millions, using god
knows how many thousands of different programs?
I personally think this particular syntax wart should've been killed at
birth... but now it's too late.
[...]
Each extra syntax check involves writing at least one more test in the
code, at least two more test cases to verify the code's correctness, some
documentation and some (UI and documentation) translations. And then
there's the (slightly) increased cost of learning the code for the
subsequent maintainers, and the UI for the users.
The suggestion was to relegate empty domain literals to an obs-
contruct, which means that parsing would not change, but it would
be come a MUST NOT generate construct. There need not be any
syntax checks for any parser w.r.t. this issue; any software
generating a domain literal would need to take some appropriate
steps.
Moving it to obs- syntax doesn't kill it, but it does declare it
as a wart.