DIP26

Title:	Properties with actual definition of the term property
DIP:	26
Version:	3
Status:	Draft
Created:	2013-02-08
Last Modified:	2013-02-10
Author:	Robert Klotzner
Links:	DIP23

Abstract

This DIP establishes a very concrete definition of the term property and desired characteristics of properties and in turn establishes semantics of use for them. For optional parentheses, I would like to adopt the scheme already explained in DIP23.

This DIP is about changing the actual specification, not trying to make the implementation to match the specification, because in my view of things, the current implementation is not that bad, rather the idea that the "front"/"empty" member of ranges is allowed to be a field, might not be that a desirable goal.

Properties in my proposal are no longer about optional parentheses or forbidden parentheses. Properties are a concept hat benefits from the fact, that parentheses are optional, but would work either way. In this DIP I emphasize the value of functions and I am questioning the idea of making properties field-like.

Rationale

DIP23 and DIP24 seem to consider properties as a tool to make a function look more like a field and strive to make it basically compatible with them, which can not work in the general case. (With get/set methods, you can not take the address for example)

Properties as defined in this DIP are a way of encapsulation of fields of an entity (class, struct, module) in a way that the class/struct/module has a chance of controlling the access and thus encapsulates it, such that the field in reality might not even exist or be in a different format than presented, ...

The usual way of establishing this kind of encapsulation, is by the use of get/set methods and not exposing any fields in public. The problem with this approach is that the common case are trivial get/set methods which just return the internal fields value or set the fields value respectively. Also the naming of set/get methods is specified by convention making it hard for tools to detect what actually is a property and what is none if the convention is broken.

This DIP simply makes properties a convenient way of providing get/set methods with a standardized syntax and convenience accessor syntax.

Description

A property in D is defined as either a specially marked get method for read-only properties:

@property T foo();

or a specially marked set method for write-only methods:

@property void foo(T value);

or both for read/write properties.

For a default implementation and solving the problem of the boilerplate problem of traditional set/get methods the following syntax is suggested:

@property T foo;

which will be lowered by the compiler to:

private T __foo; // Just some internal name.

@property void foo(T value) {
    __foo=value;
}

@property T foo() {
    return __foo;
}

As it has been asked in the newsgroups a lot: Why not simply use a public field? The syntax for accessing them in D's current syntax for properties is the same anyway:

foo=someValue;
someValue=foo;

Well yes, but this is a pitfall. A public field simply offers no encapsulation by its very definition: It is a public field. This means:

1. You can rely on the fact that the field really exists somewhere in the object - you can take its address, can use it as an lvalue.
2. You can use them in expressions, which are currently not allowed for properties like:

     foo+=someValue;  foo/=someValue;
   

While the latter could be fixed, the former can't.

Also one could do:

auto val=foo();

if foo is a function, but on could not do this if foo was a field. DIP23 tries to solve this, by disallowing foo() for properties too, essentially making properties to look a bit more like a field. I strongly believe that this is exactly the wrong direction, what is the point of being compatible with a field? You can easily make a field a function and usually programmers do this anyway, for very good reasons.

There have been some rejections to the @property field syntax on the news group. While it is true, that this can easily be achieved by means of mixins, I think, if we adopt this DIP and establish functions/properties as the way to go by default for generic algorithms, then this little additional syntactic sugar could greatly help to establish this, because creating accessor functions, would hardly be any more work than just making the field public.

Taking the address of a property

The unary & operator is free to take the address of the accessor method, just like it would for a normal function. You can not retrieve the address of the return value, because is an rvalue.

And yeah, just as in DIP23:

@property int a();
assert(is(typeof(a)==int));

Overloading @property methods

1. Properties may not be overloaded with normal functions.
2. Property-set-method overloads might be overloaded with a version taking its argument via ref, for performance reasons.

The following property definition would be illegal:

private T a_;
@property ref T a() {
    return a_;
}

as properties are defined to be get/set accessor methods, the above definition basically makes a setter not only unnecessary but would even rule out its existence, as

a=someValue;

could either use the ref returning function or the setter, thus making the call ambiguous.

Also @property would have no effect on this defintion anyway, so just leave it out. The semantic stays the same because of the optional-parentheses feature of functions:

private int a_;
ref int a() {
    return a_;
}
unittest {
    a=7;
    int c=a;
}

No UFCS for properties

As properties provide set/get methods for some kind of field, I would argue that UFCS properties do not make too much sense, as they would have to rely on (forget about private access allowed from the whole module for a moment) other public fields/functions to actually fulfill their duty. Set/get methods defined outside of the concerned entity, simply does not seem to be of any value.

But wait! What about arrays? You can not define get/set functions inside the definition of an array! Yes and this actually is the reason why all people start to scream when they read no UFCS properties, but just step a little back:

What people are concerned about, are ranges. "front" for example currently is defined in the following way for arrays:

@property ref T front(T)(T[] a) { ... }

and for strings:

@property dchar front(A)(A a) { ... }

The first definition is no longer a property by this DIP, so no issue here. The second definition would actually be a valid property (if a would be the implicit this parameter), but it does not need to be. As @property, for a getter, is basically a no-op and is just there for annotation/documentation. So for ranges this is no issue at all.

Ok, good examples and yeah this basically covers our concerns about ranges, but what if someone would comes up with a very important application, where he would actually require a setter function for an array?

Well, why would one want to do this? It would be one of the following reasons:

1. Do some validation, e.g. restrict the values that might be set.
2. Trigger some additional action whenever the array is written to.
3. Transform the input data in some way, before applying it to the array.

One and two would not really be a good idea done this way, as everyone can still access the array directly, instead it would be better to encapsulate it:

struct MyCoolWrapper(T) {
  private T[] arr_;
  @property void prop(T val)  {
     assert(isValid(val));
     arr_[someCalculatedIndex]=val;
     someOtherAction();
  }
}

The last point is the only one, which might actually makes some sense. On the other hand, why not also wrap it into a struct in this case? If you want to maintain compatibility with a plain array, there is still "alias this".

In practice you will hardly ever have the need for UFCS properties and the rare occasions where they might really come in handy, you can still write a struct instead.

And just once again to calm down everybody, it is absolutely a non-issue for ranges.

Ok, not needed and all, but they can not harm either? In fact they do, because module level properties would become ambigous. Would a one-parameter module level property be a setter or an UFCS getter. Also they can easily be abused for really non-sense scenarios:

@property void foo(int a, int b) {
  int c=a*b;
  doSomethingCool(c);
}

8.foo=9;

Well people argue, that almost every language feature can be abused. My question is just why would we allow this one, but disallow perfectly valid module level properties? Well, it only would make sense, if UFCS properties were actually a good and needed feature, but as I was trying to prove, this does not seem to be the case.

Behaviour like functions

To resolve issues with functions returning functions/delegates and optional parantheses. Properties no longer pretend to be fields, they are functions offering convenience syntax. So it is perfectly fine to call a property accessor function with foo() or foo(arg) and is even mandatory if you want to call a returned delegate/function:

@property void function() foo();

unittest {
// Call the returned function:
foo()();
}

Reasoning: There is no value in pretending to be a field, as a field can always be made a function. The other way round is only possible for functions returning ref, but not for get/set functions. Also this way properties stay compatible with normal functions, which is at least in the case necessary where you switch from set/get property to function returning ref.

@property fields Details

The compiler must generate the standard get/set methods, taking parameters by value and returning them by value. From a quick look in the Qt documentation it seems that most properties are small any way. If pass by reference is desired, the implementations would have to be written by hand.

Upgrade path

Functions like:

@property ref front();

will only need to have @property removed. Every code using it will continue to work as it did.

For ranges, where front/back really are no functions (I haven't found a single one in std.algorithm or std.range!) they would have to be changed to actually be functions, even if trivial ones, to ensure full compatibility, as code is allowed to use front(). From my search in std.algorithm and std.range it is hard to believe that there is much code out there that would be concerned. The functions would be trivial and are easily inlined by the compiler, so no performance penalty either.

UFCS properties, should be pretty rare as UFCS is a pretty new feature, the ones that do exist seem to be mostly from the ref returning type, so simply remove the @property. (Search in std.algorithm) The ones that actually are of the set/get type should either be changed to members of an actually wrapping struct or if encapsulation is not desired, changed to a function returning ref.

Generic code won't break: It can use optional parentheses, but does not have to. Calling a delegate returned by a function/property function is always:

front()();

For functions marked with @property in an illegal way according to this DIP, the compiler will simply ignore the invalid @property annotation and will issue a deprecation warning.

Conclusion

It seems to be hard for people to embrace this concept, because even people who embrace properties as a means of encapsulation, seem to think that UFCS properties are needed, because of the way they are currently used in D. But the whole point of this DIP is to reduce properties to a means of encapsulation, resulting in a very clean and straight forward design, with no corner cases and with an astonigingly good backwards compatibility to the current implementation, causing very little and trivial code breakage.

Properties are functions, don't hide this fact. Trying to pretend that they are fields is doomed to fail, because functions are the more flexible tool, that actually is why we do encapsulation in OOP.

So this DIP is exactly the opposite approach of solving the property problem: Don't make them look more like fields, make public fields more look like functions.

Don't try to make functions look like fields, this can not work. Just do it the other way round: Don't ever make a field public, but use properties, as every OOP book tells you anyway. And all problems are solved, as far as I can see.

Copyright

This document has been placed in the Public Domain.