Getting the const-correctness of Object sorted once and for all

[Era Scarecrow]

On Monday, 14 May 2012 at 02:57:57 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
> On Monday, 14 May 2012 at 02:48:20 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> But that's just one of the costs of const in D.
>
> The problem is that it's unavoidable.
>
> I.e. you can't say "don't Mark it as const if it isn't const", 
> because, practically speaking, it's being forced onto the 
> programmers by the language.

  With const and immutable being transitive, there are cases when 
there's things you want to do with an object after you've made it 
and it's in a const structure. I know I've made a struct that was 
intended to hold immutable data, however it refused to allow 
methods to until const was appended to the signatures of the 
functions. At first it was annoying; But when I see bigger 
picture of why it makes much more sense.

  Nothing we make 'has' to have const on it but inevitably they 
may be used in a read-only way. I'm trying to think of it as my 
structs and classes being as const-friendly as possible in those 
cases.