Omittable parens is an evil

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Mike" <vertex at gmx.at> wrote in message news:op.uejk9fs8kgfkbn at lucia...
> On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:32:36 +0200, Koroskin Denis <2korden+dmd at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
>> Why not have special syntax for properties, like:
>
> This has come up multiple times - that's one of the few things where C# 
> wins over D. If I may repeat a suggestion I made once, maybe Walter can be 
> hypnotized into implementing it if I just repeat it often enough :)
>
> class foo
> {
>     private int _bar;
>     property int bar
>     {
>         opGet() { return _bar; }
>         opSet(auto value) { _bar = value; }
>         opAddAssign(auto value) { _bar += value; } // it's extremely 
> extendable!
>     }

I agree, but having to reimplement the opXxxAssign methods for every 
property would quickly become tedious.  A much simpler way to do it is to 
define that:

obj.property op= expr;

is exactly the same as:

obj.property.opSet(obj.property.opGet() op expr);

I believe C# does this.  Still it'd be nice to allow opXxxAssign for 
properties to overload the default behavior, but it'd at least have a 
reasonable fallback.

In the initial designs for MiniD, when it was still a statically-typed 
language, I defined them exactly in this way, and then abstracted the idea 
by having a 'namespace' construct which could be used to implement 
properties, group symbols logically, and so on.

None of this will ever get into D.