On 21.01.2012 02:43, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
A good outcome of this vote might have been the distillation of some
simple guidelines, as opposed to enforcing some arbitrary consistency.
Apparently the participants in this thread are divided regarding general
rules as well as their applicability to this particular case.
I think that the people here have two different views of what a property is:
1) Just way to hook up some code to what looks and (mostly) behaves like
field access.
2) A property of some object, in a wider sense.
Examples of 1) are: Creating a read-only field, or delaying calculating
a value until first use and then caching it for future use. An example
of 2) would be saying that the set of keys of an AA is a property of
that AA.
As I see it, the main difference between 1) and 2) is that with the
latter you are giving field access (dot) syntax a new logical meaning
that it didn't use to have. Which why I'm weary of things like
aa.byKey. What is the gain, not having to type parentheses? That's not
a lot.
