4 ms·

How does that parse? I thought static was only a storage class.

• syncsynchalt 11y ago
  When extending the language, the committee will often try to re-use existing reserved keywords to avoid colliding with a variable name in someone's code. Thus we have yet another overloading of "static" in C, the use of "auto" in C++11 (which worked out quite well), and interesting type names such as "long long" in both. When the committee breaks this rule (think nullptr in C++11) they first must choose a name which is suitably rare (and often a bit clunky as a result), they then scan for that name in large code corpuses, and evaluate how much work they are making for the maintainers of any codebase that's going to be compiled against a new compiler (and which may need to be modified to do so). Some languages (I'm thinking JS specifically) have keywords that are not in use but are still reserved in case they may be useful in the future.