as @Arvids said, var is missing functionality that public has, so they are not exact aliases of each other. i think this is valid enough reason to remove it.
even if it weren't the case, I would say let the language maintainers decide if this cleanup would be worth it to them and make their lives easier and their code more consistent, and userland developers (including myself) be damned in 5+ years with this minor inconvenience. I think 5 years is plenty of lead time to make this fix. I'm with @James. I'm getting sick of listening to the same argument over and over. Put it to a vote, and accept whatever happens. -- Andrew Brown
