Blog post: What D got wrong

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 02:10:31PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 12, 2018 6:03:39 AM MST Kagamin via Digitalmars-d-
> announce wrote:
[...]
> > Imagine you have void delegate() prop() and use the property
> > without parentheses everywhere then suddenly m.prop() doesn't
> > call the delegate. So it's mostly for getters and should be used
> > only in edge cases, most code should be fine with optional parens.
> 
> Except that @property does not currently have any effect on this. The
> delegate case (or really, the case of callables in general) is one
> argument for keeping @property for using in that particular corner
> case, since without it, having property functions that return
> callables simply doesn't work, but @property has never been made to
> actually handle that case, so having property functions that return
> callables has never worked in D. It's certainly been discussed before,
> but the implementation has never been changed to make it work.

Yep. Basically, @property as currently implemented is useless, and I've
stopped bothering with it except where Phobos requires it.


> If/when we finally rework @property, that use case would be the number
> one reason to not simply get rid of @property, but until then, it
> doesn't actually fix that use case. As things stand, @property
> basically just serves as documentation of intent for the API and as a
> way to screw up type introspection by having the compiler lie about
> the type of the property.
[...]

Haha yeah, currently @property confers no real benefits and only comes
with bad (and probably unexpected) side-effects.  More confirmation that
it's a waste of time and not worth my attention.

If the delegate property thing is the only real use case for @property,
it seems quite out-of-proportion that an entire @-identifier in the
language is dedicated just for this purpose. One would've thought D
ought to be better designed than this...


T

-- 
Gone Chopin. Bach in a minuet.