Fixing const arrays

[Peter Alexander]

On 13/12/11 10:17 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Tuesday, 13 December 2011 at 21:10:22 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> There's a phrase in Romanian that quite applies: "From the lake into
>> the well".
>
> I believe the English version is "Out of the frying pan, into the fire" :)
>
> Inconsequential space-filler opinion: I am OK with @property, mainly
> because it's a common feature among PLs, it's better than nothing, and
> don't know better solutions.

In my opinion, it's not better than nothing.

What it gives you:

1. A bit of syntactic sugar.
2. The ability to refactor member look up easily.

What it costs:

1. Overloads syntax.
  a. obj.field can now be an arbitrary function call.
  b. May have arbitrary cost (e.g. T[].length)
2. Complicating the language (proof: this discussion)
3. Another thing to learn.
4. Another thing for tools to process.


I don't think the syntax sugar it provides counts for anything really.

The ability to refactor member look ups is nice, but I find that this 
rarely occurs in practice and even when it occurs, it's not hard to 
replace obj.field with obj.field() or obj.getField().

The costs far outweigh the benefits IMO.