UFCS for D

[Walter Bright]

On 3/29/2012 6:57 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> How the heck does that improve encapsualtion? With D's implicit friends, it
> *doesn't*, it's just shifting things around. There is NO encapsualtion
> benefit there. Like Steven said, to *get* the encapsualtion, you have to
> create a whole new module to stick "extraFunctionality" into.

It doesn't improve intra-module encapsulation, you're right. The point of UFCS, 
however, is so that *other* modules can extend a class's methods without 
breaking encapsulation.

In D, the module is the fundamental unit of encapsulation, not the class. The 
reason is the whole reason that friends exist - sometimes, more than one 
component (i.e. class) is needed to manipulate private state.