In the previous discussion concerning properties on Matrix, there seemed
to be consensus that Matrix.I was a problem. More generally, only
little defence of the general use of properties in the public API was
given.
Therefore, I suggest that we phase out *all* uses of properties in the
public API. The main reasoning is consistency: we are much more
ubiquitously using methods to get information on objects, and it is
inconsistent, confusing and unnecessary to use properties in arbitrary
places, just to save a two keystrokes.
I grep'ed for @property and found no instances of public properties that
could not easily be methods instead (*). Some cases are even
super-inconsistent, such as MPolynomialIdeal.basis (basis() is a method
on all other classes I know of).
I call for the following vote:
[ ] Phase out all uses of properties in the public API and make them
into methods that take no arguments. Add in the developer's manual
somewhere that this is the general policy.
[ ] Phase out properties which perform any non-trivial computation, and
officially condone the use of properties as "getters" of trivial
private information.
[ ] Phase out properties that might (expectedly) throw exceptions, such
as Matrix.I. Condone the use of properties as "getters" of derived
information, such as Matrix.T (transpose).
[ ] Keep things as they are.
For the record, my vote is on phasing out all properties.
There is a technical problem with how to issue proper deprecation
warnings. One possibility is to insert deprecation warnings now for >1
year, and then do the change at a major version. But I think it's more
important to decide how extensively we want to change things first.
Best,
Johan
(*): Simon King hinted earlier at possible performance degradations,
though. I don't know much about this.
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