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

[Rob T]

On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 22:04:02 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
[..]
>
> There's been a lot of strong positions years ago about 
> functions vs. procedures, statements vs. expressions, or even 
> (the glorious 60s!) in-language I/O primitives vs. I/O as 
> library facilities. Successful languages managed to obviate 
> such dichotomies.
>
>
> Andrei

Yeah, back in the day it was a relief to no longer have to decide 
if I needed to write a function or if I needed to write a 
procedure. With D, it's been a relief to no longer have to use 
empty () everywhere.

I think we've become stuck in a way of thinking that is creating 
a lot more complexity than is actually required.

For example, I can change my perception of what a variable is and 
instead view it to be specialized form of function. It has a 
default implementation and implied storage, which is returned by 
ref. The compiler can optimize away the need to a real function 
call.

If you take on a view like that, then it may be possible to 
simplify the language by merging specialized types with alternate 
syntax into one generalized type with identical syntax. You'll 
also be forced to implement things in a more consistent and 
unambiguous way as you proceed along. For example, there has to 
be different methods for getting the address of the data vs the 
address of the implementation, and the same solution can work for 
all types provided that they are treated in the same way.

--rt