"Michel Fortin" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > > Andrei, you keep complaining it's a convention. It *is* a convention, > because only a convention can differentiate actions from accessors. > Ideally, we wouldn't need a special syntax: English words would be enough. > But as you know English words alone are often ambiguous. >
It's more than just the existence of ambiguous english words. It's also that () vs no-() makes it far easier to tell at a mere glance whether or not you're looking at a function. Imagine scrolling through a big chunk of code in a language that lacks optional-parens (and doesn't do any of that Java-style "getFoo()" crap). Without even reading a word of it, you quite literally *see* "function, function, value, value, etc." But with optional-parens (or those awful Java-style accessors), that gets thrown out the window and code needs more direct examination just to get the same amount of info out of it.
