[phobos] Time to get ready for the next release

[Jonathan M Davis]

> On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:41:17 -0400, David Simcha <dsimcha at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Jonathan M Davis
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >> I know that there are a number of people on the list - particularly
> >> newer
> >> posters - who fully expect @property to be strict and are surpised when
> >> it
> >> isn't. And I see _zero_ problem with strong property enforcement as
> >> long as
> >> the compiler isn't buggy with regards to properties (which it currently
> >> is).
> >> So, I'm 100% behind strict enforcement.
> >> 
> >> - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> What about the fact that no two people can agree what should and shouldn't
> be a property? Or, more practically, that third party library A won't
> conform with organization B's coding policies? Or how about that an O(1)
> property which gets re-factored into a big expensive O(N) operation (i.e.
> see bug 5813) Or ranges/containers that may all have different mixes of
> function-like methods and field-like methods. Speaking of templates, what
> about how well/poorly opDispatch, etc compose with @property? Oh, and then
> there are entire articles against the @property solution to the
> field/method syntax problem in computer science literature (look up the
> Uniform access principle used in Ruby and Eiffel).
> 
> Also, surprise isn't necessarily a bad thing. Methods-as-properties
> surprised me I received when I first started using D and it put a massive
> smile of joy onto my face in the process.

It's a property if it's marked with @property. If it's not marked with 
@property, it isn't. Programmers can argue until they're blue in the face 
about whether a function should be marked with @property and thus used as a 
property or not, but by strictly enforcing @property, it becomes completely 
consistent. Every @property functions is called as a property and no function 
which isn't @property is called as a property.

And yes, there are definitely bugs with @property. They're going to need to be 
sorted out before @property is enforced, but the fact that bugs exist doesn't 
mean that we should never strictly enforce @property.

- Jonathan M Davis