Why is it not allowed for a variable name to match a type name? The following example fails with "Error: variable foo conflicts with struct foo"

    struct foo {}
    foo foo;

On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 17:45:35 UTC, Stijn wrote:
> Why is it not allowed for a variable name to match a type name? The following example fails with "Error: variable foo conflicts with struct foo"
>
>     struct foo {}
>     foo foo;

Imagine if you then tried to write something like

    alias bar = foo;

Or, imagine you placed the above declarations into the module `mymod.d`, and then in a different module wrote

    import mymod: foo;

Which `foo` should these refer to, the type or the variable?

On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 17:45:35 UTC, Stijn wrote:
> Why is it not allowed for a variable name to match a type name? The following example fails with "Error: variable foo conflicts with struct foo"
>
>     struct foo {}
>     foo foo;

How can the compiler know which symbol is which symbol if everything has the same name?

Standard practice is to capitalise type names and camelCase variable names.

On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 17:59:55 UTC, Colin wrote:
>
> How can the compiler know which symbol is which symbol if everything has the same name?
>
> Standard practice is to capitalise type names and camelCase variable names.

The C# compiler has no trouble understanding code like that, so I was wondering if it is a design decision for the language, or simply something not yet supported by the compiler. I couldn't find any documentation on it either. Perhaps someone can point me to it?

I did manage to work around the issue by fully qualifying the type:

    private __gshared kernel.idt.IDT_register IDT_register;

Also, I'm well aware that I'm not following the standard practices regarding naming, but I'm just toying with -betterC so I'm not really concerned about it.