Uniform Function Call Syntax in D - GameDev.net

[Kapps]

On Monday, 2 July 2012 at 05:55:20 UTC, dennis luehring wrote:
> Am 02.07.2012 07:13, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
>> On Monday, July 02, 2012 07:00:23 dennis luehring wrote:
>>> Am 01.07.2012 23:02, schrieb Walter Bright:
>>> > On 7/1/2012 11:53 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> >> That successfully compiles and prints "Member". Same thing 
>>> >> happens if
>>> >> you move the UFCS func and Foo definition out into their 
>>> >> own separate
>>> >> modules. But I was expecting a conflict error at 
>>> >> compile-time. Is this
>>> >> a bug?
>>> >
>>> > No, it's correct behavior. A real member overrides.
>>>
>>> isn't that some sort of highjacking then?
>>
>> More like it avoids hijacking. It stops you from creating a 
>> function which is
>> used instead of the one which is on the class or struct.
>>
>> Granted, this does mean that you could be surprised about your 
>> external
>> function not being called, and adding a new member function 
>> could cause your
>> existing external function to no longer be called (which could 
>> be a problem),
>> but realistically there's no other way to handle the 
>> situation. It's possible
>> to explicitly give a path to the free function (e.g. 
>> path.to.function), but
>> there's no way to do that for a member function, since there's 
>> only one way to
>> call it. So, if you were forced to disambiguate, you could 
>> never indicate
>> anything else other than the free function - not without 
>> introducing a new
>> syntax to indicate the member function.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>>
>
> but the compiler selects the member-functions silently - thats 
> odd, ok i will see it very fast - but then i need to change my 
> code anyway - so whats the reason for the silent "overwrite"?

If it didn't overwrite silently, it would mean every single free 
function is now not a valid member function name. Better hope 
your users don't import a module that uses said free function.

In my opinion, the current way is the one that makes sense. And 
extension methods in C# do this as well.