preparing for const, final, and invariant

[Chris Nicholson-Sauls]

bobef wrote:
> Without any disrespect to the great work you are doing, let me put it in another way: In order to make a good, *usable* application, is this "const final scope" thing more important or having a good GUI library? There are not many console applications these days, you know. And they are not very *usable*. And, as we all know, choosing a GUI for D is not like choosing a GUI for C++. So why instead of adding nerd stuff to the language, make it sooooo much more *usable*, by fixing the reflection stuff that Tioport needs to produce libraries which are not 10mb or 20mb? Or... it kind of sucks when half of my code won't compile, or compiles in specific order only, because of some forward reference errors. I don't even know what forward reference is, but I know that using (simple) consts and aliases is something perfectly legal. I don't know if this second example is more usable than the final cosnt thing, just because I can't think of any use of it, but this is because I rarely u
se fancy stuff that breaks my code in the next version of DMD... But I am making this example to show that D (or DMD) still have so many things to fix the way it is now, we don't need some new fancy stuff before the old things work....
> 

Well here's something: I don't /want/ Walter working on a GUI lib.  That's already being 
taken care of, with DFL, Tioport/SWT, Harmonia, and gtkD.  (Probably a few others.) 
Choice is good, and there it is.  What I /do/ want is Walter working on the things that 
we've all been asking for all this long while -- and that seems to be precisely what he's 
doing.

Some of us do still write console applications, and daemons with no direct user input at 
all.  (I look at the loooong list of software on our Linux boxes and remark that out of 
all of these, precious few have any GUI at all.  Mainly, Kate and KDE.)  If D were to go 
in a direction that only focused on application development, and only on graphical apps... 
  I'd probably have a good cry, give a salute, and just start using Ruby for everything.

Meanwhile, ask me sometime about the dozens of bits of at least one of my projects the new 
const'ness concepts will allow me to actually /write/ in a sane way in the first place. 
The project is on hold, has been for quite some while, all just waiting for something like 
this.

-- Chris Nicholson-Sauls

PS - Forward reference is using a symbol before it is defined.  Most cases of forward 
reference in D are accounted for and resolved by the compiler, but there are a handful 
that it still can't handle.  Pray some day it can handle them all -- here's hoping.