Unified function / method call syntax

[tj]

I'm not sure how this would play out with internals or if it wouldn't provide enough information to the compiler, but instead of something like:

impl Shape for Circle {
    fn draw(&self, s: Surface) { do_draw_circle(s, *self); }
}

If possible it would be great to just do something like:

fn draw(self: Circle, s: Surface) {
  // ...
}

Where circle.draw(surface) is just sugar for draw(circle, surface).

[bstrie]

Oh hai there visionmedia...

I believe we've discussed something like this in the past, but I don't think we've ever actually opened a ticket for it. See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.rust.devel/2622/ for the most recent discussion (which is still pretty ancient, at six months old). @pcwalton was the one spearheading this effort, he might have more to say.

[tj]

Another cool reason if possible beyond removing some nesting is function composition. I was going to implement it in Luna as | so it would mirror the pipes we're all used to:

cat('contacts.txt') | grep('Tobi') | print

becomes a more readable form of:

print(grep(cat('contacts.txt'), 'Tobi'))

but then I realized the method syntax sugar I wanted was effectively the same thing haha, but either way I think cat('contacts.txt').grep('Tobi').print() is nicer in a lot of cases

[brson]

Making this the issue for 'unified function calls'. Changing title.

[brson]

nominating

[bstrie]

This is nominated, but for which milestone? I know we've been talking about this for a very long time, it would be nice to know if we expect this to be a 1.0 feature.

[catamorphism]

If this is deferred past 1.0, we won't consider it a tragedy. Removing nomination.

[steveklabnik]

This RFC has been accepted, and #16293 was created to track it.

[rust-highfive]

This issue has been moved to the RFCs repo: rust-lang/rfcs#289