Why does partial ordering of overloaded functions not take return type into account?

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Saturday, 20 February 2016 at 17:20:16 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

> getValue();
>
> It's not unusual to discard the return value when calling a 
> function. Though a getter isn't a good example of this, of 
> course.

Oops. I somehow had it in my head that your example function was 
getValue(), rather than thing(). Anyway, my point was that the 
return value is not always used when calling a function with side 
effects.