On Monday, 12 December 2011 at 12:24:53 UTC, torhu wrote:
On 11.12.2011 22:24, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
...
It was debated some time ago, and it ended up being a
property. The fact that
save is an action verb and not a noun automatically
disqualifies it as a
property IMHO, but it was made into a property, and we're
pretty much stuck
with it at some point. As far as what the function does, I
don't think that
it's a problem that it's a property, but it's not named like a
property, so
the situation with regards to save is not ideal, but it's too
late now.
I really don't get this. When D has 10,000 programmers using
it professionally, it's too late. But now it's more like 5 or
10. And they are all presumably aware that D2 is still
undergoing some polish. So are the maybe a few hundred people
that are using D for hobby projects. They are early adopters,
and they know what that entails. I call bogus on the backwards
compatibility argument. There's not a lot to be compatible
with at this stage. Not compared to what D2 wants to become.
As for Andrei's book using save with the parentheses: If D2
gains traction, I'm sure there will be a second edition of that
book. And you already want to have the errata handy when using
the book. I don't see what the big deal is, at least not
compared to letting this stay in the language forever.
save being a property is a stupid inconsistency. It's easy to
fix, the cost is relatively low. The people using D2 now are
all part of a community that want D to succeed, as am I. It's a
change for the better, which I'm sure most current D2 users
would agree with. How hard can it be?
Furthermore, there weren't even a way to enforce the property
syntax until lately, and it's still not enabled by default. If we
change it right now, people still have time to adapt before the
backwards-compatibility argument even kicks in (no matter how
weak it is).
