@property - take it behind the woodshed and shoot it?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, January 24, 2013 22:24:58 Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 21:09:39 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> > The problem with @property isn't @property, it's D's
> > insistence on optional parens.
> 
> No, this isn't a problem; function call syntax has nothing
> whatsoever to do with @property because a property is NOT
> logically a function!

D's insistance on optional parens _does_ cause problems with functions that 
return delegates, but @property itself isn't really affected by optional 
parens save for the visual ambiguity caused by optional parens.

> This is so important: a property is supposed to be
> indistinguishable from a data member. That's the fundamental
> definition. It should be fully interchangeable for a plain data
> member.
> 
> In other words, as far as the user is concerned, a property *is*
> a data member, NOT a function!
> 
> If functions have optional parens, that changes nothing about how
> you access data members.... and since properties are data
> members, it changes absolutely nothing about them either.
> 
> If we required data to be accessed with foo->bar and methods to
> be called [foo:bar].... a property would be accessed foo->bar.
> The method syntax is irrelevant.
> 
> That the property is implemented with a function call should not
> be known to the user code.

This should probably be emphasized more. A property is an abstraction for a 
variable and how it's implemented should be irrelevant to the caller. Ideally, 
it would even be irrelevant whether it's a variable or a property function 
(though making that the case would require both implementing 
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8006 and providing a way to mark 
variables such that they're treated as rvalues rather than lvalues; otherwise, 
it's still possible to break code when turning a variable into a property 
function).

And we can (and should) implement @property in a way that deals with 
properties properly regardless of what we do with parenless function calls.

- Jonathan M Davis