On Friday, 19 November 2021 at 15:39:54 UTC, 12345swordy wrote:
>It violate encapsulation. Which at that point you might as well make the l-value public.
-Alex
It doesn't. Just like any other setter in any other language, it does not constraint you to return a private field in the object itself. You can return any value from any source, be it in object itself, a sub-object, on heap or on stack. The only constraint is to have it stored somewhere, so you can return a reference.
The main problem here, is that people expect for a value type to behave like a reference type here, which isn't the case in any other language too. Just try for example to return an int from a getter in java, and do ++ on it. You'll get the same behavior as in D.
Best regards,
Alexandru.