Make dur a property?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:33:11 +0100
Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:

> On 2013-01-25 20:27, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > I agree in principle, but unfortunately "return zis variable"
> > getters are often needed because no major language (that I know of)
> > offers any other way to create data that's privately-writable and
> > publicly-read-only - a very common need.
> >
> > Ie, that's the "something" that "is wrong already": the lack of a
> > simple built-in "The public can only read this, but I can R/W it."
> > to obviate an extremely common idiom.
> 
> In Ruby one would do:
> 
> class Foo
>    attr_reader :foo
> end
> 
> This would create a getter and an instance variable. Internally one
> can write directly do the instance variable, or create a setter:
> 
> class Foo
>    attr_reader :foo
> 
> private
> 
>    def foo= (value)
>      # code
>    end
> end
> 
> The equal sign indicates the method is a property. Not that 
> "attr_reader" is not a language feature, it's implemented in the core 
> library. There are also functions available for getter and both
> getter and setter.
> 
> In D, I would like to see something like this:
> 
> @property(get, set) int a;
> @property(get) int b;
> @property(set) int c;
> @property int d; // same as "a"
> 
> This would create a getter and/or setter and an instance variable.
> One could also experiment with the protection attributes like this:
> 
> public @property(get, protected set) int a;
> 
> One way could affect the instance variable, the other way to affect
> the getter/setter implementation.
> 

Interesting.

Although with that in mind it seems my earlier statement is not
entirely true. There are languages that offer a "publically read-only"
feature: C# and Haxe. I think it just didn't occur to me because they
do it via shorthand versions of their property syntaxes.