On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 2:23 AM, Dicebot <public@dicebot.lv> wrote:

On Wednesday, 4 September 2013 at 02:26:27 UTC, Timothee Cour wrote:

that's the whole point, it allows to transparently replace a field access
by a property function call without breaking client code. How else would
you do that?

You can't replace field access with function call transparently if it has side effects. In the end breakage may be even worse. For me only replacing @property fields with @property methods makes sense (with former prohibited to be taken address of and latter forced to be weakly pure).'

IIRC, &foo.x with x a property should take address of return value of x(), which will either fail to compile or do the right thing if it returns a lvalue. So there's no undefined behavior as far as taking address of is concerned when replacing field by property. 

As for side effects, this is the reason one would go from field access to property, eg populating some data upon 1st access to a field x. Sure it can be misused, but I haven't seen a case in practice where it is misused.