Do we really need const?

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

> One language I've seen that I really liked was Bla.  It uses Haskell-style
> type inference, but it still allows you to explicitly type things if you
> want.  In this way you can do away with typing variables/params in a vast
> majority of the cases, and in the instances when you _want_ something to
> be typed, or when the type inference system can't figure it out on its
> own, you can type it manually.
> 
> Of course something like this would probably be far too much of a
> departure for a language like D.

Of course type systems aren't one dimensional - there can be several kinds
of implicit static typing too. I had an impression that the lack of type
inference in some places is only temporary. I agree that some advanced type
techniques involving a Turing complete compile time language are not
exactly what the users are expecting. Heh, they might be in the future, but
let's not tell anyone - D still has reputation being a "practical language"
for "real world tasks".