On 17/01/12 10:11 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
You would need to come up with some really solid arguments why it should be
thrown out (and what we should do instead) and get both Walter and Andrei (if
not the community at large) to agree that they not only prefer your proposal
but that it's worth the issues that the changes are going to cause at this
stage.
There's a few good reasons to throw it out:
1. Avoids pointless discussions like this one. These discussions add
nothing, it's just mindless bike shedding.
2. The -property flag *creates* a new kind of error, but doesn't
actually help find real problems with your code. Without properties,
member function access would always be a.b(), and this artificial error
could be avoided.
3. Properties introduce another thing to remember, with no value ("was
it byKeys, or byKeys()?"). Without properties, it would be byKeys(). No
need to remember.
4. Properties obfuscate code. Is (a.b = c) a variable assignment or
arbitrary function call? Who knows! Is a.b an actual variable? Can I
write &a.b to get its address, or is it a function masquerading as a
variable?
5. One less language feature to implement, learn, document, debug, and
discuss.
Is it practical or realistic to throw it out at this stage? I don't
know. But there are reasons to.
