@property needed or not needed?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, November 19, 2012 22:04:02 Rob T wrote:
> I seriously don't think you should try to constrain coding style,
> instead it makes much more sense to provide the user with a means
> to constrain it themselves as they see fit. Look at languages
> that constrain coding style too much vs languages that don't, and
> consider the popularity among them.

Excep that i don't think that it's really a question of style. It's treating a 
function as if it were a variable, when it's not only not a variable, but it's 
not even acting like one. It's implying that the code has one set of semantics 
when it has another. Dropping parens when specifically creating a function 
which is intended to emulate a variable makes sense. But dropping parens just 
because you feel like it then makes a function look like a variable when it's 
not and not intended to even act like one. That violates the very difference 
between function and variable on even a conceptual level. It would be one 
thing to make a particular character or sequence of characters optional when 
doing so doesn't make it look like it's something else entirely  (e.g. 
optional braces don't make anything look like anything else - they just drop 
some characters, and they don't introduce any ambiguities in the process). But 
it's quite another to make those characters optional when they make one 
language construct look like another.

- Jonathan M Davis