What happened to the alias this = identifier syntax in 2.062?

[Chris Nicholson-Sauls]

On Friday, 22 February 2013 at 21:23:04 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> I guess the main issue is that alias blah this; shouldn't have 
> made it into the grammar in the first place. But this was 
> obviously done in order to establish a broken analogy to the 
> other uses of alias. Either alias this=blah; must be kept or 
> the alias this syntax should be deprecated in favour of a 
> specially named member function.

I believe the alias syntax was based on typedef, which was 
inherited from C, and has now been removed from D; so the 
justification was there in the past, but now absent which is why 
the change is happening now.

As far as replacing 'alias...this' with a member function, that's 
precisely how it *used* to be done with opDot(), but it suffered 
from overhead. I had thought, at the time 'alias...this' was 
first introduced, that the two were meant to live side by side, 
but then the realization came that one could actually achieve 
opDot's purpose with clever use of 'alias...this' so the latter 
fell out of favor.  Alas.