On 07/16/2012 10:55 AM, Chris NS wrote:
Having been around long enough to remember when the ability to call "foo()" as "foo" first appeared, I feel it necessary to point out that this was *not* in fact a deliberate design, but rather a sort of "accident" that arose out of D's first attempt at properties.
Afaik this first attempt was implemented roughly as designed. It is my understanding that @property was added later in order to fix the introduced ambiguities.
It was the same "accident" loaded compiler release that gave us pseudo-members -- the precursors to UFCS.
I still wonder how that could possibly happen.
The community discovered that these things were accepted by the compiler -- which was actually against the language spec at the time -- and further that the resulting code did the intuitively correct thing. Response to the "accidents" being generally positive, it was decided to work toward making them legitimate language features. Some flavor of @property (or of a certain other proposal which was a mimicry of C# properties... I was in that camp)
That would certainly be more pretty -- OTOH it is hard to think of a way to extend this to UFCS that is as natural as what happens if everything is conflated in functions.
has been in the plan ever since. I find the ongoing debate/discussion of @property and -property to be... well, moot. But hey, I'm just one crazy among an army of crazies.
Well, this newsgroup has the property that the stuff that is actually important is usually unilaterally agreed upon rather quickly. :o)
