const?? When and why? This is ugly!

[Lutger]

bearophile wrote:

> Lutger:
>> If you have a dynamic language you have a different way of programming. 
In D 
>> when I make a typo, the compiler catches it. When I do the same in Ruby, 
I 
>> have a unit test that spits out a method missing exception with a trace. 
>> Suppose D doesn't catch my typo and then my application crashes at 
runtime 
>> without such a trace, that will be a nightmare. 
> 
> This is a complex and long debated topic.
> In my D programs I put almost as many unittests as I put in Python 
programs, because experience shows me the type system of D doesn't catch 
that many bugs. The result seems strong enough D programs.
> While I debug I use the 'Phobos hack' to add something like those traces 
to D (I don't understand why such feature isn't built-in yet, it's essential 
when I debug D programs).
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

I didn't mean to imply that with D the type system unit tests and stack 
traces are obsolete or that D is better / worse.

When you say 'not that many bugs', how often does you code compile with 
errors? Because every compile time error you encounter is a bug in a dynamic 
language, and within that perspective I think it's quite a lot. Now, that 
doesn't mean dynamic languages are more bug prone, just that the way you 
program with them is different. Different enough that you can't compare type 
systems of static and dynamic languages that easily.