On Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:32:20 -0800, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 02:23:26AM +0100, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, January 29, 2013 17:06:32 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Why do you have to mark naked variables as @property? Isn't that
> redundant?
In order to restrict what you can do with it to the subset of
operations that you can do with a property function. In particular,
taking its address would need to be illegal, as that won't work with a
property function (or if it did, it would return a different type).
I see.
It would be impossible to replace a normal variable with a property
function without risking breaking code, because there are operations
that you can normally do on a variable that couldn't possibly be
implemented with a function (such as taking its address). But if you
mark it to restrict what it can do, then you could swap it out with a
function later without the risk of breaking code (which is one of the
main reasons for having properties in the first place). @property
doesn't currently do this, but it could, and if we don't have
something like that, then it'll never be safe to swap variables and
property functions.
[...]
If this is the case, then I would have to say that @property is
fundamentally broken. The whole point of @property is to make functions
behave like variables, but if this "variable emulation" isn't even
complete, then it defeats the purpose of having it in the first place.
T
Indeed, but a better idea would be to fix it, throwing it out seems a bit
extreme.
--
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/
