Annotations are one of the more ridiculous language syntax styles to emerge. The Java version is particularly ugly. Scala's version is weird too. In general the

Annotations are one of the more ridiculous language syntax styles to emerge. The Java version is particularly ugly. Scala's version is weird too. In general they are mixing a different language syntax in for attributes of methods (or even more ridiculously, classes). I suppose that adding attributes to methods was a missing feature, but I see no reason not to solve it by mixing another syntax into a language. The addition of the <i>throws</i> clause to a method definition is a good example of adding metadata without adding another language into the language. The article has a nice description of changes to PHP binding in 5.3...