On 07/10/2012 09:36 PM, Jesse Phillips wrote:
On Tuesday, 10 July 2012 at 00:17:12 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
I have heard that rumour, but TDPL wisely specifies the behaviour of
the @property attribute as follows:
'In particular "property" is recognized by the the compiler
and signals the fact that the function bearing such an attribute must
be called without the trailing ().'
That is exactly the behaviour I described.
Note that this sentence includes the notion of _calling a function_
without the trailing () and it even seems to express that the trailing
() is usually optional.
No it doesn't. It does have emphasis with 'must' and this likely comes
from D having such a long history of the optional (), but that does not
make this statement include such a notion.
I'm sure a lawyer could make a good case out of it. Anyway, TDPL
clearly does not document the broken -property behaviour.
So TDPL actually describes a subset of what I have in mind. (it seems
to leave out the function = argument case completely.) We should
therefore change where we are headed.
The -property is an implementation of what is to come. I was never
greatly for property but since we have it it should be fully enforced,
otherwise we may as well just drop it.
I think you may be misunderstanding what @property is about.
Given:
@property int delegate() foo(){ ... }
@property int bar(){ ... }
int baz(){ ... }
foo(); // calls the delegate.
bar(); // illegal
baz; // ok, call baz
dmd -property gets every single one of these wrong. -property does _not_
enforce @property semantics. It only adds a silly rule that was never
part of the @property design. I am astonished that it made it into the
compiler.
