Fixing const arrays

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:08:43 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 12/13/11 5:14 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
>> 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.
>
> We could have inferred property intention from the code pattern, without  
> requiring any keyword. That solution (which was discussed and rejected  
> in this newsgroup) was miles ahead from the drivel of @property we have  
> now.
>
> I noticed there's a tunnel vision phenomenon when it comes to  
> keyword-based solutions: once a special notation is on the table,  
> there's no appreciation for anything else. That's what happened with  
> lazy (another design misfire I'm very unhappy about) and with @property.  
> I literally feel my heart rate getting up when I think of them.

@property wasn't my first choice, there were probably a dozen proposals on  
the table.  I liked the C# version the best:  
http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs/DIP4

But here is the phenomenon I noticed:

N different solutions get proposed, and are debated by the community.   
Walter is very vocal about what he doesn't like, but silent on other  
aspects (presumably because he is considering them?)

All of a sudden Walter picks a solution, then posts a thread to flesh out  
the details.  After that, it's hard to change his mind.

For the property debate, looking back through the newsgroups, it looks  
like Walter and you came up with a solution that nobody had proposed and  
nobody liked.  Then somehow @property was chosen.  Not sure how that  
happened or what the convincing argument was.

But you will notice in that discussion that many of the solutions did not  
involve keywords, and all were given equal air time (I don't see tunnel  
vision).

Thread:  
http://dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net/discussion/post/h53g3i$elk$1@digitalmars.com

I personally don't mind @property, even if there are better solutions.   
It's not as horrible as you say IMO.

-Steve