Why I'm Excited about D

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 12 April 2015 at 18:42:01 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 4/12/15 10:43 AM, Dicebot wrote:
>> It is much better in languages that do support dedicated 
>> properties
>> because language rules can be used to express the same notion 
>> without
>> resorting to any conventions.
>
> Wouldn't e.g. C# allow arbitrary code in getters and setters? 
> And if so, wouldn't C# code need to resort to conventions to 
> avoid surprising behavior? -- Andrei

This is totally reasonable way to put it but in practice there 
are enough differences to keep it maintainable. With dedicated 
getters decision (and reviewer attention) is focused on 
definition of getter and done there once and for all. Some tough 
decisions are inevitable but it is at least possible to ensure 
that all such decisions are deliberate. In D such decision is 
done at call site which makes it very hard to review as changes 
are distributed everywhere. Though DScanner can possibly help 
here and I am really looking forward trying to it in our code 
control.

That said, I think the main reason why this notion didn't work 
well for D when @property was introduces is because of extremely 
vague range semantics. I find it important that you have 
mentioned exactly `front` and `popFront` as examples for unclear 
parens placement - problem with those is that there isn't. 
`front` may or may not be trivial getter depending on (sometimes 
arbitrary) decision by range implementor, there is no uniformity 
between those. Which makes impossible to enforce consistent 
calling style and makes "drop everything" approach much more 
tempting.