On Monday, 28 January 2013 at 13:20:22 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
It's a pertinent question. (I didn't know Ferrari is a crappy
car :o))
One interesting fact is that we have evidence at hand. Optional
parens _exist_ today in D, and have for a while. The language
has worked. They haven't been a disaster. Aside from
discussions about @property itself, optional parens have just
worked. We also have evidence that UFCS is convenient and
useful. People use it and like it. And arguably UFCS and
optional parens combine in a lovely way.
You have to think at it both way.
In a lot of code of mine, I omit parenthesis. I don't think that
is a good idea in general, but I have to suffer the
inconsistencies introduced anyway, so it make sense to benefit
from them.
We've also converted the Phobos codebase to work with the
half-strong -property switch. We've adorned a lot of functions
with @property. I don't see evidence of found bugs or improved
code quality. (Subjectively, I'd argue we actually degraded
esthetics. There's no love lost between me and that "@property"
plastered everywhere.)
It seems to me that phobos has way too much @property in the
first place (save for range for instance).
I'm pretty sure phobos has that much @property because they were
implicit in the first place. Phobos state is to more the
consequence of the laxness that existed in the first place rather
than a problem with the later fix.
These are not "what if" hypotheses; they describe experience
accumulated from past events. Even people who dislike optional
parens or UFCS must agree that their sentiment is far from
widespread - unlike, for example, was the case for string
lambdas.
I have to say I've seen many people « liking » the
parentheses-less calls, but not many coming with actual
arguments. You are an exception here. I usually don't trust games
of numbers on such topics.
