Are properties actually all that good?

[Ali Çehreli]

On 07/22/2013 08:07 AM, Land wrote:

 > I was just thinking about properties and to be honest, I don't
 > like them all that much. There's no way to tell if it's a
 > read-only or write-only property (right?),

Documentation should make it clear. Otherwise, it should be possible to 
detect whether a property is read-only, etc. a la templates in std.traits.

 > but getValue and setValue are pretty self-explanatory.

Agreed, but as I said in that earlier thread, I find it repetitive and 
unnecessary when it is obvious:

     cpu.temperature;

The following is also slightly wrong, in the sense that it is not 'cpu' 
that will get the temperature:

     cpu.getTemperature();

Temperature is a property of 'cpu'; there shouldn't be a verb associated 
with it. The whole issue is not that important anyway. However 
imperfect, everybody understands what get/set methods are. (Judging from 
the word "method", they must be common in languages that have "methods". ;))

 > Also, someone was angry about .keys making a copy. I agree with
 > that person and think that instead of a property, there should be
 > a method called copyKeys or getKeysCopy to make it obvious.

Agreed. It is simply historical.

 > Or does anyone have different view on the matter? I'd be happy to
 > hear it.

Ali