Messing storage classes and type qualifier is a pain

deadalnix deadalnix at gmail.com
Tue May 8 06:32:15 PDT 2012


Types qualifier (const, immutable, shared, inout) are currently mixed 
with storage classes (static, ref, whatever . . .).

The current situation is potentially armful. type qualifier are part of 
the type, and always mean the same thing. Storage classes don't modify 
the type, depends on where they appear in code and change semantic.

With a broader view, storage classes influence the declaration, type 
qualifiers the type.

They are very different beasts. The fact that they can be mixed cause 
massive code duplication in any D frontend. This additionally create 
unnecessary duplication of identical semantics (ie const ref vs ref 
const ? ).

I'm not advocating for removing this, because it would break code 
unneedlessly, but it should definitively be marked as a technical debt 
we have, and lesson have to be learn from it.


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