• Start Date: 2014-10-07
• RFC PR: rust-lang/rfcs#342
• Rust Issue: rust-lang/rust#17862

Summary

Reserve abstract, final, and override as possible keywords.

Motivation

We intend to add some mechanism to Rust to support more efficient inheritance (see, e.g., RFC PRs #245 and #250, and this thread on discuss). Although we have not decided how to do this, we do know that we will. Any implementation is likely to make use of keywords virtual (already used, to remain reserved), abstract, final, and override, so it makes sense to reserve these now to make the eventual implementation as backwards compatible as possible.

Detailed design

Make abstract, final, and override reserved keywords.

Drawbacks

Takes a few more words out of the possible vocabulary of Rust programmers.

Alternatives

Don’t do this and deal with it when we have an implementation. This would mean bumping the language version, probably.

Unresolved questions

N/A