@view vs @views with scalar indexing

[nalimilan]

Currently @view always returns a SubArray, even when indexing with a scalar:

julia> x = 1:3
1:3

julia> @view x[1]
0-dimensional view(::UnitRange{Int64}, 1) with eltype Int64:
1

OTOH, @views returns the element when indexing with a scalar (as documented):

julia> @views x[1]
1

The behavior of @views sounds more consistent with plain getindex, and generally more useful. Rather than changing @view, @mbauman suggested deprecating it in favor of @views.

See #23051 (comment) for an example where the behavior of @views was more natural (but participant to the discussion seemed to be aware of its existence, so we ended up checking the index type manually).

(More radically, one could wonder whether view itself should behave like getindex when indexing with a scalar, and return the element rather than a view. Though that would be problematic if the goal was to mutate the parent array.)

[nalimilan]

Reactions about this (old) proposal?

[JeffBezanson]

I think we can close this; @view and @views have different purposes. @view is just an alternate syntax for calling view, while @views is a transformation for performance.