Static attributes & immutability, static attributes seen from instances

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
news:hmsqdk$9ud$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
> news:hmrtbk$1aoi$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>> A bit later in the discussion div0 and Pelle M. have said/suggested that 
>> accessing static vars through an instance can be a bad thing, and it's 
>> better to allow the programmer to access them only through the 
>> class/struct name.
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> I've always felt that the ability to access static members through an 
> instance was just a bad idea in general, and this seems to add another 
> reason not to allow it.
>

The one possible exception I can think of (and I'm not even sure if it's 
applicable to D or not) is if you're passed an instance of something and 
want to call a static member of it polymorphically. Without polymorphism you 
can just do "typeof(instance).staticFunc()", but I'm not sure offhand 
whether or not there's a way to do that polymorphically (or if static 
members can even be polymorphic).

However, I think that if people are calling static members through instances 
instead of types just to make the call polymorphic, then I'd consider that 
less of a reason to allow "instance.staticMember" and more of a reason to 
have some sort of polymorphic runtime equivilent to typeof() (Do we 
currently have such a thing that can suffice?).