Why I'm Excited about D

[Jens Bauer via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 7 April 2015 at 08:33:58 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> @property isn't really about parentheses-less calls 
> (parentheses are optional for all function calls), it's more 
> for this sort of thing:
> [snip]
>     @property void val(int v)
>     {
>         a_ = (a_ & flagMask) & (v & ~flagMask);
>     }

This is *really* cool and very useful on microcontrollers and is 
superior to C's bit-fields.

Imagine that your microcontroller has 24 GPIO pins.
Such pins are usually grouped in 'ports', for instance Port A and 
Port B.
Each port could for instance support up to 32 pins: PA0 ... PA31 
and PB0 ... PB31.
But there's a problem here: Our microcontroller has only 24 pins, 
and our microcontroller vendor chose to make the following pins 
available to us:
PA1 ... PA5, PA7, PA13, PA17, PA18 .. PA19, PA23 ... PA28
PB0 ... PB3, PB8 ... PB12

Every developer will think this is annoying. We want to write a 
byte to a port, but it has to be converted first.

If just incrementing a value, one could do as follows:
PortB = (PortB | 0x00f0) + 1;
... oposite for decrementing:
PortB = (PortB & 0xff0f) - 1;

But the @property can make all this transparent, so our sources 
become very easy to overview and understand.