Jorgen Schaefer wrote:
> This complicates code understanding a lot, and all for the sole
> purpose of saving two parens.

There is another purpose: Hiding representation.  Many languages
use a different syntax for accessing fields (slots) than from
accessing methods.  This encourages people to create public
fields, because accessing them can be terser.  But style guides
discourage this, because it makes it hard to change representation.
If one could hide a method call behind "slot-access syntax" you
can have he flexibility of changing representations combined with
the terseness of a fields access.

Now I'm not sure how identifier-macros really help, except perhaps
*internally* in the class implementation, which is less important.
But my point is that there are good software-engineering reasons why
you might want to have a function-call hide behind what looks like
a variable access.
--
	--Per Bothner
xxxxxx@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/