any news on const/invariant?

[Janice Caron]

On 11/27/07, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> That's only if one thinks that const, when applied to a function, also
> influences its return type. There is no reason why transitive const
> should apply in this way.

I do understand. But I'm thinking of the poor programmer who hasn't
unravelled all the knots yet, and wants a member function to return a
const ubyte[]. Such a programmer could easily accidentally end up
writing

    const ubyte[] f() {/*...*/}

thinking (not unreasonably) that this will return a const ubyte[] ...
and being completely wrong.


> > Perhaps this is a case where "const at the end"
> > creates a more helpful mneumonic?
>
> It leads to awful looking code when you have a lot of them to do.

If you're making const-at-the-end syntactically valid, then it's fair
game to use it. If you don't want it used, don't make it legal.

But if you /do/ make it legal, the (apparent) disambiguation it gives
is, I feel, helpful.

Other possible syntaxes have been suggested. Here's another one to consider:
    ReturnType const(functionName)(parameters...)