Revised RFC on range design for D2

[Chris R. Miller]

Sergey Gromov wrote:
> 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.

Awe, but making the syntax more complex makes the code look so much more 
unfriendly ;-)

My thought process hadn't even touched upon the idea of adding another 
keyword.  But then what would the keyword be?  "noeq"?  "noprop"? 
"propless"?  "muffin"?  (I vote for muffin!)  ;-)