VB10 will have an “implicit line continuation” feature where the goal is that in the 98% case you won’t need to type the underscore anymore.

The case you mention though is one of those situations where it gets trickier for us to remove it, due to the ambiguity of With blocks.

Dim rect = RectangleFluent.Create()
.SetColor(Color.AliceBlue)
.SetHeight(16)
.SetLength(16)

If that code is inside a With block then we could parse it as one statement or 4 statements. We could make a rule to prefer one approach over the other, but that would just get confusing and messy.

Instead what we’ve done is allow the underscore to be implicit *after* the dot:

Dim rect = RectangleFluent.Create().
SetColor(Color.AliceBlue).
SetHeight(16).
SetLength(16)

Definitely not perfect, but we felt this was a reasonable compromise.

Hope that helps,

Jonathan Aneja
Program Manager, VB Compiler

Yes, there is no reason why I clever F# compiler could not have an extension operator to do just that. I’ve recently discovered that :: is treated as a special case by the compiler as it is actually a discriminated union constructor that expects a tuple but is allowed to act as an infix operated that is curried, so there is a precedent for such special cases.

I’ll suggest it to the product team.

I will have to look at why identions are not working in the comments, but i still get an unexpected symbol in binding when i try.

let rect =
RectangleFluent.Create()
.SetColor(Color.AliceBlue)
.SetHeight(16)
.SetLength(16)

Thanks for the link

I agree that pipelining methods is a more functional solution to fluency. Every method call in .net takes this as the first parameter. I wonder if the f# compiler could exploit this to allow for pipeling without the need for extension methods?

For the F# code in the last example, you could use:

let rect =
RectangleFluent.Create()
.SetColor(Color.AliceBlue)
.SetHeight(16)
.SetLength(16)

I’ve written a blog post about it a couple of months ago.