Just a thought: read-only fields

[Nick Sabalausky]

It's been established in the recent epic-discussions on properties that one 
of the biggest uses for properties is to implement publically read-only (but 
privately-writable) fields. That got me thinking, why not actually have real 
publically read-only fields instead of merely emulating them with 
properties? They are, after all, a fairly common idiom.

// *Not* an actual syntax proposal, but just to get the idea across:

private @publicread int foo;

// The class sees it as "int", but everything else sees it as "const(int)"
// ...or something like that...