Revised RFC on range design for D2

[Steven Schveighoffer]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" wrote
>> P.S. If src.next() is too lengthy, why not just adopt ++src?
>
> Because people (in wake of the recently introduced array operations) may 
> legitimately expect that to mean "increment all elements of src".

So in one case, you believe people's assumptions aren't important, i.e. an 
assumption that .next without parens will not change anything on the object, 
yet in another case you believe people's assumptions are the main argument. 
This doesn't sound consistent.

Not that I care too much :)  I am also in the camp of 'defined properties 
should be a language feature,' but I admit to using D-properties quite 
often.

The two things that bug me the most about D property syntax:

stuff like this:

x;

What the hell does this mean?  It looks like it does nothing.  But it could 
be a function call.  If explicit properties were required, and x was defined 
as a function, not a property, then x; would be a syntax error.

And stuff like you said:

writefln = 3;

I've been bitten by this type of weirdness.  In Tango, in the TimeSpan 
struct, I created several properties, one of which was:

ulong seconds();

Which converts the entire timespan to seconds.

I also had static 'constructors' to build time spans from common time types 
that looked like this:

static TimeSpan seconds(ulong nseconds);

Well, someone complained that this didn't set the timespan's value to 3 
seconds, in fact the second line does nothing but create a temporary 
TimeSpan and throw it away:

TimeSpan ts = TimeSpan.seconds(5);
ts.seconds = 3;

And it does seem like it should set ts to equal 3 seconds.

So we were forced to abandon the succinct syntax of the static constructors 
and rename them fromSeconds, etc.  If properties were explicit, then I could 
define 'hey you can only use this static constructor as a function NOT a 
property'.  It's really those cases where you want to disallow one use or 
the other that are desired but not allowed by the current language.

-Steve