Gašper Ažman wrote:
> The committee actually did look at the (F this) syntax and it took a long
> time to convince them that it's a bad idea.

It's the lack of plain access to members without having
to write this-> or this. or self. that I regret losing.
I.e. I don't want to be able to write "this.foo" in
preference to "self.foo" in such a method, I want to be
able to just write "foo".

I have sometimes wondered whether it would he helpful to
provide syntax to bring arbitrary objects' members into
scope. Without this, free functions are inherently more
verbose than methods. I think that Pascal and/or Modula-2
had a "with" statement that allowed this. Example:

struct Circle {
   float r;
   float area() const { return pi*r*r; } // concise
};

float area(const Circle& circle)
{
   return pi*circle.r*circle.r; // verbose
}

float area(const Circle& circle)
{
   with circle {
     return pi*r*r; // concise
   }
}

You'll probably tell me this was considered and rejected years ago...


Regards, Phil.