Unofficial wish list status.(Jul 2008)

Bill Baxter wbaxter at gmail.com
Tue Jul 22 16:40:18 PDT 2008


On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:27 AM, Brad Roberts <braddr at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Walter Bright wrote:
>
>> superdan wrote:
>> > i couldn't design an const/invariant system to save my life
>> > from the same cannibals who ate bjarne. the space looked like a zero
>> > sum shit to me. so when i saw what walter came up with, i was rightly
>> > surprised. same goes about some shit in phobos2. it's not just yet
>> > another library. it's a fucking cool one because it's better in a new
>> > and surprising way.
>>
>> I cannot claim credit for it. The const/invariant design was the result of
>> literally hundreds of hours of work (and maybe a hundred gallons of coffee) by
>> Andrei, Bartosz, Brad, David, Eric and myself, as well as feedback from the
>> community on why our earlier efforts got it wrong.
>>
>> The transitivity requirement originated with Andrei, if I recall correctly.
>
> Quite possibly it was both of us, but I know I brought it up in
> discussions with you prior to joining the group discussions.  It's my
> primary angst with c++ const.

By that do you mean something that's caused you actual trouble in C++
projects?  Or just something that keeps you awake at night worrying
about the trouble it could cause?  My feeling is that C++ const does a
decent job in practice of preventing programmers from doing stupid
things.  On the other hand, if you're trying to go out of your way to
be stupid... that's another matter.  But for the most part, while it
may be easy to circumvent const, it's not so easy to circumvent it
accidentally.  Useless for making compiler optimizations, yes, but
fine for documenting the intent of code.

--bb



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list