property syntax strawman

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-08-03 10:39:17 -0400, "Robert Jacques" <sandford at jhu.edu> said:

> Thank you for the very elegant expression of the problem and for 
> posting  the programming guidelines wiki. My criticism is that you're 
> defining your  context to narrowly. A function/property/field isn't 
> just defined by it's  name, but also by it's type and the context it's 
> in. A 'transform' of type  void or typeof(this) is obviously an action, 
> while a 'transform' of type  Matrix might be a coordinate frame. The 
> object's type also conveys context  information; a 'transform' on an 
> autobot might be an action, while a  'transform' on it's 3D model might 
> be a coordinate frame. Even if you  don't know the return type off the 
> top of you're head (i.e. you're doing a  code review), 'transform;' or 
> 'object.transform;' are obviously actions  while 'auto a = 
> object.transform;' or 'object.transform = a' is a noun.  English solves 
> it language ambiguity issues with context, so why can't the  same 
> solution apply to programming languages? Sure, pathological examples  
> are possible, just as they're possible in English, but that's no reason 
> to  switch to a different language.

Interesting remark. You're right of course about the transform example 
is much clearer in context. I'll conceed that point. But take note you 
let the user of the API do the disambiguation instead of the designer 
who wrote the function in the first place. I believe the later is 
better placed to decide. That said, it's rather a minor point in my 
opinion.

I'm more concerned by the ambiguity when returning callable objects or 
delegates when functions have omittable parentheses.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/