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Postings from March 2011
On Mon, Mar 07, 2011 at 03:56:08PM -0800, Jan Dubois wrote: > On Mon, 07 Mar 2011, Chris Prather wrote: > > > > In my opinion you're moving from dangerous to useless at best. I feel > > that the *semantics* of this syntax are confusing. They confuse method > > dispatch with assignment*. > > I disagree. The semantics of setting attributes/properties are the > same as assignment: > > * setting the attribute multiple times to the same value is not supposed > to have any additional effect beyond what the first assignment did > > * the attribute is supposed to return the value it was last set to > > Attribute setters/getters are *not* supposed to be generic methods; they > are syntactic sugar for assigning and querying values. > > And many languages (VB, C#, JavaScript, of the top of my head) all use > assignment syntax for property manipulation. > > The fact that under the hood they all perform a method dispatch is an > implementation detail that doesn't have to be exposed to the user. I would go the other way. The fact that calling a method is implemented as storing/fetching a value is an implementation detail that should not be exposed to the user. Hence, it should not have a different syntax. AbigailThread Previous | Thread Next