Read-only property without @property

[Kapps via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 26 September 2014 at 22:58:53 UTC, Cliff wrote:
> This is a clever syntax, but I can't say I particularly care 
> for it since it aliases two names for the same location which 
> differ only in their visibility, and this feels... wrong to me 
> somehow.
>
> In C# this is a sufficiently common practice that the property 
> syntax allows for it directly:
>
> class Foo
> {
>     int A { get; private set; }
> }
>
> The compiler automatically creates a (hidden) backing property 
> (this is an implementation detail of course), both internal and 
> external customers use the same name, and there is no 
> redundancy.
>  If I were to compare the D way and the C# way, I would prefer 
> to C# way for this trivial-property case.  What I would NOT 
> want is C#'s special handling of properties to go along with it 
> - a D analog would preserve A's access methods and handling as 
> if it were a field if that was the user's wish.
>
> That's my $0.02.

C#'s way of declaring properties is something I've been missing 
in D for a long time. Using a mixin is just plain ugly and breaks 
tooling, yet this is such a common thing to have to do. It is 
quite disappointing that there's no shorthand for it, like 
'@property int a;' or '@property(readonly) int b'.

(On that matter, I'm not a fan in general of properties being 
various methods glued together by an @property, but that's set in 
stone by now.)