On 02/04/2013 03:28 AM, deadalnix wrote:
On Monday, 4 February 2013 at 02:18:08 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
On Monday, 4 February 2013 at 01:30:49 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I think most, if not all, detailed rules derive from these.
One does not, the strange special case for taking the address of a
property.
I'd REALLY urge you to explore alternative solutions, such as the one
proposed by Andrej, before introducing an abomination like
distinguishing between "&a" and "&(a)".
There is no way such strange behavior could be explained in a way that
is coherent with the rest of the language.
I found that when you are working on a complex problem and have a
solution that seems to work for everything except a little detail, the
best approach often is to step back a bit and have an entirely fresh
look at that area again, but now taking the rest of your design as a
given.
The problem we are dealing with here isn't complex. It is made complex
artificially.
It is not even made complex. It is quite obvious how things should work.
(and &a vs &(a) is not it.)
We are trying to make @properties behave like fields,
(Syntactically.)
but hey in this case I want it to behave like a function . . .
This is the step that must be reconsidered.
oh yeah so in this
special case, I have to workaround, ho and here and here as well, oh
damn, that is complicated.
Same goes when conflating the function with it's return value (which
optional () is about).
Certainly not! & is the syntactic element distinguishing functions from
return values, not (). Optional & would be about conflating the function
with its return value. (Scala basically does this, but instead of prefix
& they use suffix _.)
Introducing a rule by which parenthesizing an expression in a way that
does not change precedence suddenly causes a difference in behavior
certainly wouldn't be among the first ideas coming to my mind this way.
By trying to make things easy, we miss that the important point is to
make them simple.
Most of this stuff is simple enough. Have you implemented optional
parens already?
