why ; ?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Michael Neumann" <mneumann at ntecs.de> wrote in message 
news:48236605.9050806 at ntecs.de...
> Yeah, you are right. It is inconsitent to define the instance variable
> with "i" while accessing it with "@i":
>
>   class A {
>     int i;
>
>     void foo(int i) { @i = i; }
>   };
>

That's not really what I meant (See below for clarification of what I 
meant). Actually, I hadn't even thought of that, but it is a good point.

> Btw, I wrote a C++ preprocessor script that during compilation
> transparently replaces every occurence of "@" by "this->".
> Would be nice to have this build into D directly.
>

I agree, that would be nice (provided, of course, it didn't interfere with 
deliberate uses of "@", such as within a string). Unfortunately, in C++ or D 
it still wouldn't solve the problem of accidentially clobbering the instance 
variable "i" by intending trying to use a local var "i", but forgetting to 
declare it:

// Note: untested
class A {
  int i=0;

  void foo() {
    // Accidentially clobbers "this.i" aka "@i"
    for(i=0; i<77; i++)
      {/* Do stuff */}
  }

  invariant() {
    assert(this.i==0); // Fails after foo() is called
  }
}

I still like the @ thing, though.