Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Friday, 9 March 2012 at 23:50:50 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> At first I didn't like it a lot because it's cheap syntax sugar 
> that adds no new power and gives programmers more freedom to 
> write different-looking versions of the the same code (and this 
> is often bad).

What I like about is the encapsulation benefits. You
don't have to know if the function is a method or an
external function, it just works.

External, non-friend (so separate module in D) functions
are often preferable to methods because they don't have
access to the class' private members, so they cannot rely
on those implementation details.

Extending objects with new functions in this way also
means you don't break binary compatibility with the
existing code, since it isn't modified at all!


Of course, you could always do this with the old
syntax too, but then the syntax preference means
you are biased toward one implementation or the
other - it doesn't mesh as well and you may be
tempted to make things methods for the syntax,
despite the cost in compatibility.

UFCS rox.