YAPP - D properties - voting

Michiel Helvensteijn m.helvensteijn.remove at gmail.com
Sat Aug 1 11:17:32 PDT 2009


Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> It is ridiculous, particularly in light of the fact that no poll shows
> the landslide prevalence of "everybody".

Not everyone may agree, or understand. But if you look at it objectively,
D's 'properties' cause inconsistencies, ambiguities and limitations. I'm
not listing them again, since it doesn't seem to have any effect.

I fully understand that the simple rewriting rules currently used were by
far the easiest way to get properties into D. No extra syntax or anything.
Walter probably only needed a day or two to put them into the compiler. Not
much thought had to go into it. This is evident by the fact that +=, ++,
etc. don't work. And then you could advertise that D had properties.

Then some people started to abuse property syntax to save three keystrokes
(one for the shift-key). So now all of a sudden, real properties can't ever
work for D, since you'd lose your no-parentheses function-calls, and some
backwards compatibility.

But it is a flawed design. Many people have tried to explain this to you.
But when faced with the facts, both you and Walter avoid the issue. You
focus on minor mistakes in peoples posts and then ignore their real
message. And often you simply never reply. Take, for example:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Reddit_why_aren_t_people_using_D_93528.html#N93753

I don't think D will soon adopt the kind of properties some of us have been
advocating. You'll just treat the symptoms, I expect. This post is not
meant to convince you. It simply needed to be said. I apologize for my
confrontational tone.

-- 
Michiel Helvensteijn




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