On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 21:09:39 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
The problem with @property isn't @property, it's D's insistence on optional parens.
No, this isn't a problem; function call syntax has nothing whatsoever to do with @property because a property is NOT logically a function!
This is so important: a property is supposed to be indistinguishable from a data member. That's the fundamental definition. It should be fully interchangeable for a plain data member.
In other words, as far as the user is concerned, a property *is* a data member, NOT a function!
If functions have optional parens, that changes nothing about how you access data members.... and since properties are data members, it changes absolutely nothing about them either.
If we required data to be accessed with foo->bar and methods to be called [foo:bar].... a property would be accessed foo->bar. The method syntax is irrelevant.
That the property is implemented with a function call should not be known to the user code.
