
Richard Eisenberg
writes:
I'm leery of the breakage that this would cause. But, there has been no chorus of voices complaining about breaking changes in the recent past (AMP and changes to Typeable are top on my mind), so perhaps our community is more tolerant of breakage than I would guess.
Also, the breakage argument never resolves itself with time, so if it's always heeded, we simply cannot progress toward the solution most of us would have chosen from the beginning, had we foreknowledge of things to come. I think it's a great thing we're enduring the pain now to correct past decisions, and move toward a cleaner theoretic foundation. As for pure vs. return: What I like about 'pure' is that it declaratively says something about the value, rather than the action constructed from that value. It says "this action has no other semantics than what can be determined from the value itself". John