const issues and more!

[Michiel Helvensteijn]

Yigal Chripun wrote:

>> But wouldn't the expected behavior be to implicitly duplicate the string
>> literal? Or better yet, to never actually allocate memory for the string
>> literal at all, but simply use it to set the initial value of the
>> variable?
> 
> you're quite right, and on some OSes (Linux) no memory is allocated (on
> the heap/stack) but rather the value is store in ROM.
> however, char[] is an array which means you could have done the following:
> char[] a = "abc";
> a[1] = 'd';
> which would segfault because you're changing something in ROM!
> that's why the type of string literals is variant(char)[] or string for
> short, and the above behavior is disallowed.

But wouldn't you want that to work exactly as written?

char[] str = "abc";
a[1] = 'd';
assert(str == "adc");

"abc" here is just the initial value of the mutable variable str. So it
should be allocated in the memory pointed to by str.

In other words, an implicit cast should take place, or an implicit
duplication should be made.

That it doesn't work like that is, in my opinion, a flaw of the language. D
seems to continually get more difficult to use.

-- 
Michiel