Lack of `outer` keyword makes inner class dup implossible

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"S." <S._member at pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:e98u9d$oqh$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
> It seems that because inner classes lack an `outer` keyword it is 
> impossible for
> them to create a new instance for the purpose of COW when operators like 
> opCom
> are called...

It's irritating, isn't it?  The workaround is to make the ctor for the inner 
class take a reference to its owning outer class, then you can use the 
syntax

Inner dup()
{
    Inner n = outerThis.new Inner(outerThis);
    return n;
}

That is, you can 'new' the inner class using the outerThis reference.

I suppose another way would be to do some terribly ugly, nonportable hacks 
to _find_ the outer pointer manually.  Maybe if we do that, Walter will see 
that having an 'outer' reference would be useful.