new DIP5: Properties 2

[Chad J]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Chad
> J<chadjoan at __spam.is.bad__gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Nono, I don't think that's really what's being suggested.  It'd work
> more like operator overloading.  "opAdd" and the like aren't parsed
> any different from any other functions, and they're not represented
> differently inside the compiler; they're just functions with "magical"
> names.  Similarly, opGet_foo would be a normal function in any way,
> and its name would only be significant in the case of "obj.foo", which
> *could* be rewritten as "obj.opGet_foo()" (or "obj.opSet_foo").
> 

Op overloading is a bit different since the identifier never changes.
What you are matching is always one of opAdd, opSub, opNeg, etc.  But
when matching this there are an infinite number of permutations:
opGet_foo, opGet_bar, opGet__, opGet_a, ..., opGet_aa, opGet_ab, etc.

I'm not saying it's hard to do, just that it looks to me like it defeats
its own virtues.

> Also, if you think D can be parsed without any information from the
> semantic pass?  I've got news for you..

Yeah, that's still not a good reason to make a bad thing worse :/