@property with opCall

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Monday, 9 March 2020 at 10:09:56 UTC, Calvin P wrote:
> @property exists so many years,   Druntime & Phobos use it  
> 2280 times. I can't believe it is not recommended.

They never implemented it right. This opCall type thing was THE 
case we brought up to introduce @property in the first place.... 
but it never actually affected this.

For years, @property did absolutely nothing. We were told to use 
it for the future. Some people tried to put on a compiler switch 
to make it do something, but they consistently made that switch 
do the wrong thing! Then @property got frozen for fear of broken 
changes. LOL.

Now @property changes the result of `typeof(a.prop)`... but 
nothing else.

@property is one of the biggest WTFs of D's development.

Here's a wiki page referencing one of the 2013 discussions 
https://wiki.dlang.org/Property_Discussion_Wrap-up

though i'll note the thing is older than that.

What especially drove me nuts is people would so often say 
"property *syntax*" instead of "property semantics" - everyone 
would go on and on and on about banning optional parenthesis 
which should be a totally unrelated discussion when we should 
have been talking about the semantic question and focusing on the 
case you discovered - the case that actually matters.