Const sucks

[Gregor Richards]

Russell Lewis wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> What we are trying to achieve:
>>
>> a) utility for functional programming
>> b) better modularity by self-documenting interfaces better
>> c) be able to treat reference types as if they were value types (i.e. 
>> strings should behave to the user like value types, even though they 
>> are references)
> 
> Is there a way to express (for a pointer passed as a function parameter) 
> "the callee is allowed to modify this object through the pointer, but 
> the caller ensures that no other code will be modifying it at the same 
> time"?   Sort of a "you have exclusive write access" modifier?  Is that 
> a common enough case to even support?
> 
> Russ

It would probably be easy enough to add such a type modifier, but 
literally impossible to to hold that restriction, so I don't think it's 
worth it. There's no magic-bullet for concurrency.

  - Gregor Richards