Req19: Allow statements to start with parentheses

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[This post is part of a series, "wish-list for future versions of VB"]

 

IDEA: Allow statements to start with parentheses. Currently, every statement in VB must start with either an identifier or a keyword. We should allow statements to start with arbitrary expressions. At the very least, starting with "open parentheses" would be good. It would mean that we'd no longer need "Call" in the following statement:

  Call (New Threading.Thread(AddressOf ThreadProc)).Start()

 

Provisional evaluation from VB team: It'd be a surprisingly big change to the parser code to implement this! We see that it would be useful, but don't believe it would be worth the effort to fix.