Revised RFC on range design for D2

[Sergey Gromov]

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:08:43 -0700,
Chris R. Miller wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > I think we all agree that there are some annoyances related to the whole 
> > property business, among which the main one is:
> > 
> > writeln = 4;
> > 
> > That is quite indefensible :o|. I consider the others rather minor, but 
> > that's just a personal opinion.
> > 
> > How about this. Maybe if we attacked this annoyance in particular, that 
> > would be a large bang for the buck without a landslide change in the 
> > compiler. We only need some way to inform the compiler, "yes, it's ok to 
> > call a.b(c) as a.b = c". Ideas?
> 
> Just trying to think of something that could be easily parsed...
> 
> void foo(char t)!={ /*do something with t*/}
> void bar(char t)  { /*do something with t*/}
> 
> void main() {
>      foo('t'); // okay
>      foo='t';  // not okay because of the "!="
>      bar('t'); // okay
>      bar='t';  //  okay
> }
> 
> My thinking is that it doesn't break existing code.  One could change 
> the order to precede the argument list, but I don't like that as much 
> because it becomes ambiguous when used in conjunction with templates.

I cannot see how trickery with an existing syntax is less a feature than 
a new keyword.