Parsing of .field and .property syntax allows space

[thchr]

I was surprised to see that this is allowed:

julia> struct A
           a :: Int
       end

julia> A(1).             a
1

I.e., the lowered code just disregards the spaces:

julia> @code_lowered A(1).            a
CodeInfo(
1 ─      nothing
│   %2 = Base.getfield(x, f)
└──      return %2
)

A similar thing happens for getproperty.

I imagine that it is not a good idea to fix/change this in Julia v1.x, since there could well be plenty of typos out there that implicitly depend on this - but I was suggested to file an issue for it anyway; at least there's a record of the thought this way.

[mbauman]

It looks like we talked about deprecating this in #11891, but perhaps its error message wasn't good enough to make the final cut? Also related is #17305, requesting allowing whitespace on the other side of the ..

[thchr]

Ah, okay: those are clearly overlapping. One of the linked threads also had this comment #29781 (comment), which is a reasonable argument for allowing this.

Since this has already been discussed at some length, there is probably little need for another issue: I'll close this.