On Friday, 25 January 2013 at 18:00:24 UTC, Rob T wrote:
So historically, the fist implementation of the property
concept was through a syntax change, allowing removal of empty
parens for the getter and assignment syntax for the setter.
That was actually before my time. The optional parens feature has
been in D for as long as I can remember; it was there well before
1.0.
But yeah, @property was added a few years ago over concerns about
a small handful of edge cases.
Why was a partial implementation of an experimental half-backed
idea released into the wild?
This is the reason it is on a compiler switch, -property, instead
of the main language. Without -property, the @property decoration
is ignored. (And with -property, it doesn't do anything useful.
The implementation is basically:
-property: break my code
@property: please don't break this code
It doesn't fix a single thing, and IIRC the implementor knew it;
he just put it in as a first step toward something more complete.)
