@property - take it behind the woodshed and shoot it?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 21:09:39 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> The problem with @property isn't @property, it's D's
> insistence on optional parens.

No, this isn't a problem; function call syntax has nothing 
whatsoever to do with @property because a property is NOT 
logically a function!

This is so important: a property is supposed to be 
indistinguishable from a data member. That's the fundamental 
definition. It should be fully interchangeable for a plain data 
member.

In other words, as far as the user is concerned, a property *is* 
a data member, NOT a function!


If functions have optional parens, that changes nothing about how 
you access data members.... and since properties are data 
members, it changes absolutely nothing about them either.


If we required data to be accessed with foo->bar and methods to 
be called [foo:bar].... a property would be accessed foo->bar. 
The method syntax is irrelevant.

That the property is implemented with a function call should not 
be known to the user code.