Getting consistent behavour for class properties

[Lodovico Giaretta via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 2 October 2016 at 14:26:46 UTC, mikey wrote:
> [...]

Yeah, a property is quite different from a variable. In fact, a 
property may refer to a computed value, which may not have an 
address and as such cannot be modified:

@property auto currentTimeMillis()
{
     return currentTimeNanos/1000000;
}

So it is correct that `+=` doesn't work with properties, and 
neither does the "addressof" operator `&` (it returns the 
delegate). Having a getter property return by ref circumvents 
this issue, but has the drawback of bypassing any check that a 
setter property would do.

If you want to use properties as getters/setters and also want 
compound assignments to work, you can easily achieve that with a 
wrapper template as this[1] one.

[1] http://pastebin.com/38n0fEtF