Needed return type in static method? bug or feature?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Tuesday, March 08, 2016 14:56:06 Antonio Corbi via Digitalmars-d-learn 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 8 March 2016 at 14:13:17 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 8 March 2016 at 13:40:06 UTC, Antonio Corbi wrote:
> >> Is it a feature or a bug?
> >
> > It is allowed because the "auto" keyword doesn't actually
> > required for auto functions (or variables), what you need is
> > any one of the storage classes.
> >
> > Those include static, auto, const, immutable, even pure.
> >
> > If any of them are present, the compiler knows you are writing
> > a function or declaring a variable and will infer the type.
>
> Thank's Adam!.
>
> I had figured out something like this but I couldn't find
> anything in the docs
> (http://dlang.org/spec/attribute.html#static), moreover, the
> example there:
> ----------8><---------------------
> class Foo
> {
>      static int bar() { return 6; }
> ...
> ----------8><---------------------
>
> does mention the return type, that's what confused me.

The return type is optional so long as one of the keywords that indicates
that it's a variable or a function is there, so you can choose to put it or
not. In most cases, I think that folks put the return type on functions or
use auto, but it's up to you. Where it usually comes up is enums and
variable declarations.

- Jonathan M Davis