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

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Friday, 25 January 2013 at 18:00:24 UTC, Rob T wrote:
> So historically, the fist implementation of the property 
> concept was through a syntax change, allowing removal of empty 
> parens for the getter and assignment syntax for the setter.

That was actually before my time. The optional parens feature has 
been in D for as long as I can remember; it was there well before 
1.0.

But yeah, @property was added a few years ago over concerns about 
a small handful of edge cases.

> Why was a partial implementation of an experimental half-backed 
> idea released into the wild?

This is the reason it is on a compiler switch, -property, instead 
of the main language. Without -property, the @property decoration 
is ignored. (And with -property, it doesn't do anything useful. 
The implementation is basically:

-property: break my code
@property: please don't break this code

It doesn't fix a single thing, and IIRC the implementor knew it; 
he just put it in as a first step toward something more complete.)