Revised RFC on range design for D2

[Chris R. Miller]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Chris R. Miller, el 28 de septiembre a las 19:50 me escribiste:
>>>> It reduces codebase coherency
>>> How? Why?
>> In Java, if something was called like a function with the () and everything, you 
>> could be pretty dang sure it's a method.  In D, if it doesn't have a () when you 
>> see it, it could still be a method called as a property.  The only way to find 
>> out is to look it up, which can be tedious and boring.  If you don't look it up, 
>> you may never know, which reduces the coherency of the code.
> 
> In Java you have the exact same problem. Since it doesn't support
> properties, and people don't want to chage thousands of LOC if they need
> to change a simple member variable to a function, they use functions just
> in case. So when you look at a function, for example, getSomething() you
> still wonder: is this just a simple return something;? Or is *really*
> a function?
> 
> The problem is the same, you just have to use uglier syntax =)

In Java for some reason the "Industry Standard" was that using 
non-constant public members was a Bad Thing (TM), and that getters and 
setters were the only acceptable thing.  For most things this was more 
or less just an annoying function set that looked like this:

class Foo {
	private String bar;
	public void setBar(String bar){
		this.bar=bar;
	}
	public String getBar(){
		return this.bar;
	}
}

Other times (rare, I never personally needed it) they were important to 
allow input checking (what we'd do like this:

void setBar(char[] bar)
  in {
	assert(bar.length>=3);
  } body {
	this.bar=bar;
  }

And some times (such as in certain Swing/AWT code) they would 
immediately affect something, eg. setting the text on a window would 
immediately send a message to the rendering engine and make a change 
happen the next time the window was painted.

Overall it wasn't a fault with Java, just with the Java programmers. 
They were so used to using getFoo/setFoo they just used it all the time.