Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:36:53 -0400, Daniel Keep  
<daniel.keep.lists at gmail.com> wrote:


> There's also the argument for debuggers being able to automatically
> display properties; I think this one is fairly borderline since if I was
> writing a debugger, it would only *automatically* display the result of
> pure functions, property or not.
>

I agree with this.  A property should only be callable by the debugger if  
it is pure.  I don't think properties should be required to be pure,  
because pure functions are far too restrictive for properties.

Note that in other debuggers which debug code that is fully runtime  
inspectable, such as Visual C#'s debugger, the IDE will tell you if  
evaluating a property will result in an object change, so they must mark  
the property somehow.

I think the other reasons for having property syntax are much more  
important than this.

-Steve