Having been around long enough to remember when the ability to
call "foo()" as "foo" first appeared, I feel it necessary to
point out that this was *not* in fact a deliberate design, but
rather a sort of "accident" that arose out of D's first attempt
at properties. It was the same "accident" loaded compiler
release that gave us pseudo-members -- the precursors to UFCS.
The community discovered that these things were accepted by the
compiler -- which was actually against the language spec at the
time -- and further that the resulting code did the intuitively
correct thing. Response to the "accidents" being generally
positive, it was decided to work toward making them legitimate
language features. Some flavor of @property (or of a certain
other proposal which was a mimicry of C# properties... I was in
that camp) has been in the plan ever since.
I find the ongoing debate/discussion of @property and -property
to be... well, moot. But hey, I'm just one crazy among an army
of crazies.
-- Chris NS
