Overloading static methods

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 8/30/11 7:40 AM, Marco Leise wrote:
> Am 29.08.2011, 22:24 Uhr, schrieb Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>:
>
>> On Monday, August 29, 2011 12:53 Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
>>> On 29-08-2011 19:47, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>> > On Monday, August 29, 2011 07:44 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> >> My opinion is that static methods should *not* be callable from an
>>> >> instance, you should need typeof(instance).staticMethod. The current
>>> >> allowance is misleading.
>>> >
>>> > Yeah. I don't know why it's allowed. I think that C++, Java, and C#
>>> all
>>> > allow it too, but I've always thought that it was a bad idea in all of
>>> > those languages. I don't see a problem being able to call a static
>>> > method inside of its class without giving the class name (if you had
>>> > both a static and non- static method with the same name, then you
>>> could
>>> > simply require that either the type name or this be use), but it
>>> strikes
>>> > me as very lax to allow a static method to be called with an instance.
>>> > That's definitely one of the little things that I'd love to see
>>> changed.
>>> > It's not the end of the world if it isn't, but I see no cons to
>>> changing
>>> > it other than the possibility of breaking code (which was arguably bad
>>> > code to begin with).
>>> >
>>> > - Jonathan M Davis
>>>
>>> C# doesn't and I'm fairly sure Java doesn't either (though I'm certainly
>>> no Java expert). Overall, I think this entire "call static method on
>>> instance" deal comes from C++.
>>
>> I haven't used C# much, so I'm not entirely surprised if I'm wrong
>> about that,
>> but I'm 99.99% sure that Java allows it. I definitely remember being
>> irritated
>> by it in Java.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> Java allows it, but gives a warning and auto-correct option to use the
> class reference instead, in Eclipse. That probably means that there is
> no justifiable use-case for it.

In Java that is, which has very weak generic programming. Generalizing 
that to D would be at best speculative.

Andrei