Lints, Condate and bugs

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, October 29, 2010 10:04:03 Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > Personally, I think that both would be horrible. Having const is great,
> > and having non-nullable references could be great, but I sure wouldn't
> > want them to be the default. In addition to that, however, having them
> > as the default would make porting code from other C-based languages a
> > total nightmare - not to mention it totally shatters the general
> > principle that either C/C++ code is valid D code with the exact same
> > behavior it doesn't compile. That alone makes making them the default
> > untenable.
> 
> 	How does making const and/or non-nullable default break this
> principle? If the code relies on nullable variables, then it won't
> compile, otherwise it will work exactly the same way as C.
> 
> 		Jerome

Hmm. I suppose that in the general case it wouldn't (though the change in syntax 
for const (what would you do, add mutable or unconst?) would certainly result in 
a _lot_ of code having to be changed), but once you add in shared libraries 
having non-nullable be the default could be a problem since the code which deals 
with the fact that something could be null could be disconnected from the code 
which actually declares the non-nullable references or pointers such that it 
compiles just fine, but the code which uses it chokes. But you're right that it's 
not as bad as I was thinking.

Regardless, I don't think that it's a good idea. And this late in the game, even 
if it were a good idea, I think that we should think long and hard before making 
that large breaking change. D is supposed to be stabilizing now, not making 
language changes which break tons of code.

- Jonathan M Davis