Why can't we define re-assignable const reference variable?

[Janice Caron]

On 21/02/2008, Sergey Gromov <snake.scaly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Janice Caron <caron800 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> This is Ok.  It's changing the .length directly which I don't like, and
>  which is actually unpredictable.

It's always safe, and it's always predictable. It's just not very useful.

    string s = "hello";
    s.length = 10;

s will now contain "hello" followed by five default-value chars. Given
that string contents are immutable, that's completely pointless. But
it makes a lot more sense with non-constant arrays. For example:

    char[] s;
    s.length = 5;
    /* blah */
    s.length = 25;
    /* blah */
    s.length = 10;

etc. In this case, the buffer will be reallocated somewhere else, and
the original contents copied so you don't lose anything. It's exactly
like calling realloc() in C or C++.