So, to be more specific, here is one of cases where it actually
caused trouble in practice. Someone has originally written code
that looked roughly like this:
while (something)
{
// ...
auto str = format("%s", parser.node);
}
Long time later I have been adding trace logs to that module
and this has become akin to
while (something)
{
log(parser.node);
// ...
auto str = format("%s", parser.node);
}
Which resulted in broken application. It took almost an hour to
bisect all changed to trace the failure to this specifc line
and realize that `parser.node` wasn't just trivial getter but
method which actually advanced internal iterator to next node
while returning current one.
In Java many people would have done this instead:
while (something)
{
log(parser.getNode());
// ...
String str = format("%s", parser.getNode());
}
Because trivial accessors are everywhere in Java one usually has
to assume it has no side-effects. I fail to see the relevance of
the missing () in your example; () doesn't scream side-effect in
C++/Java/C#/C. The real issue here is that 'node' or 'getNode' is
simply poorly named suggesting it has no side-effects. 'nextNode'
for instance doesn't have this problem.
