On Monday, 12 December 2011 at 14:46:17 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 12/12/11 6:49 AM, Manu wrote:
I think every opportunity should be taken to make important
breaking
changes while the community is as small as it is.
Changing from r.save to r.save() is NOT an important change. It
makes no semantic difference, marks no progress, and has no
consequence.
Insisting on the current property semantics was a sizeable
mistake of this community, and I am sorry we gave into it.
Andrei
The whole point of a property to begin with is to make it look
like a field, which has two important implications: improves
interchangeability with function access vs a field, and exploits
the user's intuition associated with accessing fields.
It is in light of the second consequence that it makes a
difference. This is nothing new; the style guides for properties
in C# operate on the same basic principle: if it looks like field
access, it should behave like field access. If the programmer
sees just "r.save", he doesn't know whether it's a field or a
property, and he shouldn't need to know, it should be fast and
cheap, and return a consistent value. As far as I know, this
isn't always true for save, which means it breaks with the user's
intuition.
I don't know whether or not this is an important change, but it
*does* have consequence, and the current property semantics (as
enforced with -property) are definitely meaningful. The old
situation where you could write complete nonsense code like
`std.file.read = "foo.txt";` is far worse.
