Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[Walter Bright]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:10:59 -0400, Walter Bright 
> <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>> That's my problem with properties as a distinct syntax - they don't 
>> have distinct uses or behaviors.
> 
> If you delineate what can be called how, then you elminate syntax 
> ambiguities from occurring, and eliminate bizarro cases of syntax.  The 
> difficulty is that the "human meaning" of a property is different than 
> the human meaning of a function.  To the compiler, they're all 
> functions, so you as the compiler writer aren't seeing that they are 
> different.  I think we all agree that writefln = "hi"; makes absolutely 
> no sense to a person.  But it makes complete sense to the compiler, 
> because it has no idea what the word "writefln" means to a person.

But when I suggest a restriction on properties, I get complaints that 
someone might want to have them do what functions do. So I fail to see 
what rule distinguishes them from functions, even for people.


> It's the exact same reason + is not the concatenation operator.  
> Semantically, making + concatenate two strings together would be 
> completely unambiguous from adding two integers together because strings 
> do not define addition, and integers do not define concatenation.  From 
> your own documentation, someone seeing "10" + 3 might think that he 
> would get 13 or "103".  Even if the compiler defines what "should" 
> happen, and the rules are unambiguous, it looks incorrect to the user.

Using + for concatenation is syntactically ambiguous with vector addition.