Omittable parens is an evil

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Koroskin Denis" <2korden at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:op.uelw2ttaenyajd at worker...
> On Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:56:26 +0400, Tomasz Sowiñski <tomeksowi at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
>> downs Wrote:
>>
>>> bearophile wrote:
>>> > Tomasz Sowiñski:
>>> >> When coding, at first, I was glad to be able to snip the parens
>>> (makes code look cleaner), but then I came to the same conclusion - the 
>>> illusory cleanness of code strikes back in the form of trouble with 
>>> telling "something" and "do something" apart.<
>>> >
>>> > I agree that omittable parens is bad, I always put them.
>>> > If parens become compulsive you don't need to use "&somefunc", you
>>> just use "somefunc" to denote the pointer/delegate and "somefunc()" to 
>>> call it.
>>> >
>>> > Bye,
>>> > bearophile
>>>
>>> Seeing as I don't share your opinion on this topic, I humbly submit 
>>> that this is not a problem with the language but with the coders, 
>>> specifically, people who have used function pointers in C.
>>>
>>> Since I acquired D before I had much need for that atrocious syntax, 
>>> &function has always made more sense to me.
>>>
>>> Because of this, I do not see a problem with foo or foo() - both are 
>>> clearly not the function address.
>>
>> I think functions should be called thisWay() and function addresses 
>> should be obtained &thisWay.
>>
>> But then we would have the question what should thisWay symbol mean 
>> without parens or ampersand? Maybe it shouldn't mean anything? or use it 
>> only to pass functions into other functions as arguments? hm...
>>
>> Tomek
>
> I think it should be used to address to the function itself, like 
> typeof(func), func.stringof, func.mangleof, etc.
>
> func() <- function result
> &func  <- function pointer
> func   <- function itself

I've always liked in other languages where the "function pointer/reference" 
and "function itself" are considered one and the same. This just seems like 
extra unnecessary complexity.