Why free and realloc seem to include .

[Temtaime via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Thursday, 3 August 2017 at 14:03:56 UTC, Michael wrote:
> So this might be a bit of a stupid question, but looking at the 
> DMD source code (dmodule.d in particular) I see the following 
> code:
>
>>if (srcfile._ref == 0)
>>    .free(srcfile.buffer);
>>srcfile.buffer = null;
>>srcfile.len = 0;
>
> and I was just wondering why certain functions seem to be 
> called using the dot operator on its own, unattached to some 
> object. This is probably a naive question but I haven't seen 
> this in my limited experience using D and I was just wondering 
> why this is. I have only really seen this relating to D's 
> manual memory management. But in the same file, I see examples 
> like this:
>
>>FileName.free(n);
>
> so what is the case when you should use .free() and why not 
> just free()? Thanks.

Dot is equal to C++'s :: operator to access a global namespace.
Aka ::free(ptr);