Conditional Pure?

[bearophile]

%u:

> might turn out a bit unreadable. And, furthermore, I'd *like* to be able to say
> something like "this method returns a shared const value iff the given type is int
> or long" but this won't work with const() or shared() because of their syntax (you
> can't say const(is(T == int))). Any ideas on how we might be able to get that to work?

@optional_tag(is(T == int) || is(T == long)), const)


> Oh, and while on the note of const, here's a somewhat unrelated concern: I've
> noticed that code like this:
> 
> static const int* addressOf(ref int x) { return &x; }
> 
> is *very* tricky and misleading, because it's declaring the method as const, not
> the pointer. Would it be a bad idea to forbid const, pure, nothrow, and the like
> from coming before the method name? That way it won't be ambiguous like this.

I and few other people have asked for this, I think there is one closed enhancement request on this in Bugzilla, but I think Walter closed it on the basis of uniformity in attribute syntax (and maybe compiler simplicity too).
Sometimes it's worth breaking uniformity if this avoids some troubles, especially if all this breakage does is creating some easy-to-fix compile-time errors. I think this is one of such cases.

Bye,
bearophile