Have "." be syntactic sugar for "this."

[victorcassel]

It is not rare to see this. in source code, although it is not needed.
Maybe there is a reason! It brings some readability/understandability when you immediately see that a call to the current object is going on...
So I suggest . to be an allowed short form of this.

(I know you can write .5 instead of 0.5 which could be a problem)

[iam3yal]

@victorcassel What some of us do is prefix fields with an underscore, I don't know whether shortening this. into . really makes the code more readable, I think the opposite.

I said it before but I think people confuse readable with terser code.

[HaloFour]

Why not just omit this entirely and use the identifier name directly? You only ever need this when disambiguating between a local identifier that shadows a class member. As such the explicit use of this should already be relatively uncommon, certainly not common enough to justify another syntax for it.

[jnm2]

This might block other proposed syntax that starts things with .. I don't think this use case is worth taking that.

[victorcassel]

Probably this. is a stressed programmer's "leave behind" after having used intellisense to save typing. But ask tool makers like resharper - it is a common cleanup suggestion.

First discuss and analyse the phenomenon from the user perspective, later from the language implementer perspective.

[Joe4evr]

it is a common cleanup suggestion.

But there are also people who prefer to have this. explicitly in every case. You can even set VS to tell/warn/error now when not specified, even when it's unambiguous.

Making code shorter != making code more readable. If it were, you might as well remove half the letters from your function names.

[theunrepentantgeek]

@Joe4evr There's real science behind readability, whether talking about code or regular prose. At the risk of over generalising, additional words take longer to read - as do misspelled ones.

[victorcassel]

@theunrepentantgeek What you say seems be a good argument against this.

[theunrepentantgeek]

Generally, I'm in favour of removing this. when its not absolutely required.

In my experience, the rarity of this. tends to make it stick out like a sore thumb, calling attention to that piece of code. This unfortunately means that when I read code where this. is used heavily, it reads as though it's shouting all the time. #personalexperiences

[MhAllan]

Beside readability, You do need "this" keywords to filter the intellisense list while typing, especially when you have many imported namespaces, the "." suggestion is not readable, and will bother you if you are typing and missing a semicolon in the previous line.

[biohazard999]

You need this. to invoke an extension method on the current instance, so if you remove it, you need to use MyStaticClass.DoStuff(this); instead.