poll for properties

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Dimitar
Kolev<DimitarRosenovKolev at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Bill Baxter Wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 4:35 AM, Dimitar
>> Kolev<DimitarRosenovKolev at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> > Kagamin Wrote:
>> >
>> >> bearophile Wrote:
>> >>
>> >> > Dimitar Kolev:
>> >> > > None. I would call it isEmpty or isEmpty().
>> >> >
>> >> > This may interest Andrei: lot of people here (me too) seem to think that the name "isEmpty" is better than "empty" for that purpose.
>> >> >
>> >> The very properties discussion comes from D living in the context of C family languages and their good practices. Python somehow managed to rebel from those...
>> >
>> > The properties discussion arises from the people who can not think of good names for variables and functions.
>>
>> Andrei decided to use empty over isEmpty because he wanted names as
>> short as possible for the fundamental ops for ranges.  It had nothing
>> to do with not being able "think of" isEmpty.  He thought of it and
>> rejected it as too cumbersome for this purpose.
>>
>> And it shouldn't be particularly ambiguous if understood to be an
>> attribute of the range and not an action on the range.  Unfortunately
>> we have no way in the language to specify that distinction.
>>
>> > So they get confused by things like empty. It should be isEmpty the state and empty the function then there will be no confusion which does what and people can finally realize that () are optional.
>>
>> If you don't have dedicated property syntax, then I agree, you
>> probably should avoid the ambiguity and resort to isEmpty.
>>
>>
>> > This is just an example but good names are the reason for all this weirdness. Or bad names.
>>
>> I think having dedicated property syntax makes it easier to choose
>> good names because there are fewer ambiguity landmines to watch out
>> for.
>>
>> --bb
>
> As long as you can call variables and functions the same way with a . and as long as you can dismiss the () there is no way to make a distinction.

Exactly.  That's what this whole long properties discussion has been
about.  I guess you haven't had a chance to read all those many posts.


> There are 3 options:
>
> 1) Enforce () for all functions.

This is what "properties" folks are asking for.

> 2) Make () optional and people start choosing good names and not being influenced by laziness or whatever else.

This is status quo.


> 3) Make calling properties in a special way. Some weird syntax like
> a#a = 9 or a$a = 9.

This is just wierd and doesn't solve the basic problem property-like
syntax is supposed to solve, which is allowing the designer of a class
to change implementation from a simple field to a function without
affecting client code.

--bb