On Sunday, 22 June 2014 at 05:18:05 UTC, Jonathan M Davis via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Sun, 22 Jun 2014 00:12:20 +0000
Mason McGill via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com>
wrote:
"Attribute" and "property" are pretty much synonyms in English,
and it always seemed strange to me that D had to define them as
different--yet confusingly similar--entities.
They're not even vaguely similar in D. A property is a member
of a struct or
class which is a variable or a function which emulates a
variable, whereas
attributes are annotations put on symbols (currently just
classes, structs,
and functions AFAIK) which indicate extra information to the
compiler and to
type introspection.
So, while I can see why you might dislike the fact that
attribute and property
do not mean the same thing in D, they're _not_ at all similar
it how they're
used, so I find it very odd if anyone is confusing them. And
it's not like D
pioneered these meanings for attributes and properties. C# uses
them for the
same things.
- Jonatahn M Davis
I was referring to the `Property` and `PropertyIdentifier`
entities in the D grammar (http://dlang.org/attribute.html),
which are special cases of attributes. "New-style" attributes,
like "property", "safe", and "nogc", are `PropertyIdentifier`s
and need to be written with the "@" character. Older,
non-property attributes, like "pure" and "nothrow", do not.
Sorry if this wasn't clear in the former post.
