Make dur a property?

[deadalnix]

On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 19:36:35 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
wrote:
> The same argument was brought about overloading  operators, 
> about overloading functions, etc. In other words the argument 
> is WYSIWYG, but humans inherently think in overloaded notions 
> and take obvious shortcuts
> just about everywhere.
>

That is not because it is ambiguous, where . overload behavior 
for pointer isn't.

Such behavior would be like if pointer dereferenced automagically 
and you add to put & everywhere to not dereference them. That 
would be an horrible behavior, as well as calling function 
automatically is an horrible behavior.

So we want to avoid () for convenience. I have noting against 
convenience, but here it is plain wrong :
  - We have 2 syntax to do the same thing.
  - If the return value is callable, it is unclear what is done.
  - We need something to NOT call the function, as it is called 
magically. Let's introduce &funName syntax and mess up with 
another feature.
  - It is now unclear when we take the return address or the 
address of the function.
  - It is also not clear how to pass a function as parameter (we 
have seen the case recently).
  - Depending on the callable, () and & have different behaviors, 
which is error prone, harder to learn for newcomer, harder for 
generic code, and exactly what everybody hate about C++ .

I have nothing against convenience, and like very much the 
pointer + dot behavior. I actuelly proposed something similar 
with functions : function.identifier can call the function 
without (), which is the equivalent of the pointer thing in term 
of convenience. Going further inherently mess up with other 
features of the language.