On 2010-01-27 15:54:42 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> said:
Now @property is in. That has created (as I had anticipated) the
unresolved issue of choosing between @property or just function for any
given parameterless function. Also I need to litter my code with
@property. To this day I am not sure whether we made the right decision.
Well, perhaps it'd be better if it was 'property' instead of
'@property'. I find the distinction between keywords and attributes to
be pretty arbitrary, almost illogical.
I'm on the side that attributes (those keywords starting with @) should
be reserved to things you can ignore entirely without preventing the
program from working. For instance, remove all @safe and @trusted
attributes from a program and it still works with no change in
behaviour (except for when an error occurs). 'nothrow', 'pure',
'final', 'deprecated' should be attributes; '@property' should be a
regular keyword. Protection attributes could be made attributes too
since if you remove them all everything still works.
So I think attributes should be reserved to non-essential but useful
stuff in the language, generally those things adding restrictions
without changing the semantics.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
