On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:43 AM, language_fan<[email protected]> wrote: > Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:58:32 -0400, Jarrett Billingsley thusly wrote: > >> (Of course I find the whole property >> syntax used for type introspection a bit silly, a half-thought-out >> feature that's hard to parse, not easily extensible, and which doesn't >> fit syntactically with the rest of the metaprogramming facilities.) > > Maybe it requires a better grasp of the big picture to fully understand > the nuances involved? After all, a feature like object.stringof is much > easier to type than the other alternative __traits > (get_string_presentation_of, object)
Or it's just that Type.property was in the D spec as early as 1999, and D wasn't initially meant to have metaprogramming, so its various introspection capabilities are kind of .. organically grown. __traits is ugly only because W wanted it to be. traits(stringof, x) is just as easy to type, far easier to parse, and much more consistent than x.stringof.
