On Monday, 7 May 2012 at 21:34:29 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
You mean the setter?
Having a getter property function return by ref does allow you
to use a
property exactly as you would a variable, because you're
operating on the ref
that's returned. It also makes the property function
nigh-on-useless, because
then you're operating on its associated variable outside of the
property
function, making it so that you can no longer control access to
it. You pretty
much might as well make it a public variable at that point. Not
to mention,
even if returning by ref didn't have that problem, it would
only work in cases
where the property function was associated with an actual
variable (since you
have to return a ref to _something_), so it would still be
impossible to
emulate a variable with property functions which calculate the
value from
other variables or which grab the value from somewhere else
(e.g. a database).
- Jonathan M Davis
And what about my idea of returning a struct by ref and using a
struct to represent all of the operations you're interested in?
As far as I can see, it should work, but admittedly, it's not as
slick as it could be.
