"headconst" dynamic arrays?

[Marco Leise]

Am 31.08.2011, 20:27 Uhr, schrieb Kagamin <spam at here.lot>:

> bearophile Wrote:
>
>> Some functions need to do everything on a given array, while in other  
>> functions I just want to change the array contents. How can the source  
>> analyzer tell them apart and show some warnings only on the second kind  
>> of functions, without specific annotations?
>
> It will check them indiscriminately. There's little need to overwrite  
> input parameters. Input parameters are by nature likely to be read,  
> overwriting them usually means you lose them, and losing parameters that  
> are likely to be read is a bad practice, so it's a good idea to check  
> for it.

I had some of these cases in my JavaScript code where I process the  
parameter before I use it. But I'm now listening to Eclipse's advice and  
give them proper variables. So zoom becomes effectiveZoom and so on. But I  
guess it is a matter of preference. It is like Delphi's "Result" variable  
in functions that you can write to several times until you have your final  
output. Likewise people sometimes modify the input until they've got what  
they want. Clamping numbers, prefixing strings or replacing default/null  
values are use cases.