On 01/24/2013 03:45 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Thursday, January 24, 2013 00:34:42 Walter Bright wrote:
This has turned into a monster. We've taken 2 or 3 wrong turns somewhere.
Perhaps we should revert to a simple set of rules.
1. Empty parens are optional. If there is an ambiguity with the return value
taking (), the () go on the return value.
2. the:
f = g
rewrite to:
f(g)
only happens if f is a function that only has overloads for () and (one
argument). No variadics.
3. Parens are required for calling delegates or function pointers.
4. No more @property.
Another issue to consider is enhancements such as
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8006
As a property function is supposed to be an abstraction for a variable, and
you really should be able to swap out property functions and public variables
without breaking code, things like
foo.prop += 5;
and
++foo.prop;
should work. Unfortunately, D's current property implementation is poor enough
that that code doesn't currently, but that can be fixed in a backwards-
compatible-manner.
I think what you want is semantic property rewriting.
Please see this:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DocComments/Property#Semanticrewritingofproperties
But implementing something like that becomes more problematic without explicit
properties (potentially even dangerous, depending on what ends up happening
with those sorts of expressions with non-@property functions which are called
without parens). Maybe it could be done, but it seems to me that it's the sort
of thing that should be controlled. We don't want lots of voodoo happening
with functions called without parens, as we risk getting some nasty bugs when
using functions that weren't really meant to be properties. But we _do_ want
some of that voodoo with functions that are designed to be properties.
So, I really think that we need to have explicit properties, even if we allow
paran-less function calls in some other cases.
But honestly, I wish that we'd just gone with something closer to what C# did
with properties from the get-go.
- Jonathan M Davis
