On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:54:33 -0500, Pelle Månsson
<pelle.mans...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 01/28/2010 11:23 PM, Michiel Helvensteijn wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I agree. So where's the consensus? Things seemed so clear when people
were beaten with @property over their head.
If I read the TLP correctly, @property seems not to be working
correctly.
@property (or any other notation marking property getters/setters)
should be
enforced. Functions that have it must only be invoked using property
syntax. Functions that don't have it must be called with parentheses.
That's the whole point. To give the designer of the class control over
how
it is used.
The problem is people blurring the line between what's supposed to be a
function and what's supposed to be a property, by abusing property
syntax
to invoke actions without parentheses.
In reality, I believe there's not only a clear line between the two
intentions, there's a demilitarized zone. You just need to enforce it.
You
can't have your cake and eat it too.
I don't understand what any of this would improve. Is the byLine example
less readable without the ()? Is it more bug prone?
The only thing achieved as I can see is that every class designer makes
up his own rules about which functions are property and which are not.
If this is somehow enforced, it will become a guessing game about how to
call no-argument functions. For what?
Just as every class designer makes up his own rules about naming
functions. The parentheses are part of the name of a function. Whether
in your view the parentheses have meaning or not is your opinion. But you
should not be able to attach your own meaning to my functions. What if we
allowed a feature where you could call functions with just an unambiguous
prefix? so something like:
stdin.by();
Is that ok with you? It's not unambiguous, is it just as easy to
understand as using the full name?
The fact that byLine is just as descriptive as byLine() makes no
difference. It is not a quintessential example of ambiguity. It should
be a property IMO because of what it does, but even if it's not, it's not
ambiguous. There are other cases which are ambiguous.
-Steve
