On Monday, 4 February 2013 at 02:28:39 UTC, 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.
We are trying to make @properties behave like fields, but hey
in this case I want it to behave like a function . . . 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).
Not sure I'm following – you are arguing that the whole endeavor
is futile as long as we keep parens-less function calls?
I actually think that DIP23 is a big step in the right direction,
given that parens-less function calls are *very* unlikely to go
away. Contrary to some of the previous proposals, it's actually a
principled approach, like Adam and others (including me) have
asked for. Now it's just a matter of getting the details right.
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.
My point is precisely that. I think there are much simpler
solutions than adding some magic properties to a pair of
parentheses in the right position, even if it might look like a
convenient hack.
David
