@property needed or not needed?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Monday, 19 November 2012 at 15:01:36 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Would you please start a DIP with a paste of this idea?

here it is:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs/DIP21

I tried to implement this a while ago and hit some pain after 
some early success. The pain was trying to get assignments to 
work without breaking other cases like returning ref.

My plan was to make any reference to a @property change to a 
CallExp or whatever. But if you do that and it is on the left 
hand side of an assignment, you do the wrong thing.

foo = foo + 1;

should generally become:

foo(foo() + 1);

but if there isn't a setter, we should leave it as foo() = foo() 
+ 1; and finding the setter is a bit of a pain. Then, of course, 
we ideally want foo += 1 to work too..

Maybe someone who knows the compiler better than me will make it 
look easy though.