Stepping back and looking at constness from another angle.

[Regan Heath]

Denton Cockburn Wrote:
> On Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:25:21 +1000, Reiner Pope wrote:
> 
> > Another problem with const by default came to mind. Consider the
> > following code, with const-not-by-default:
> > 
> > void foo( ref const(char)[] c)
> > {
> >      c = c[1..$];
> > }
> > 
> > I would hate to see this in const-by-default, which would try to wrap a
> > const( ) around the whole type. To counter that, you would probably have
> > to write some mess like
> > 
> > void foo ( mutable( ref const(char)[] ) c ) {
> >      c = c[1..$];
> > }
> > 
> >    -- Reiner
> 
> Again, I'm also trying to understand this, knowing that things change a 
> lot over the course of the discussion. That being said, I thought the 
> current position is that by adding any other qualifier, such as ref, 
> const/scope/final is no longer automatically applied.

I thought so too.  As Don says; 'ref' is an alias of 'inout'.  It's ver
y purpose is to indicate a variable which is going to be modified.  Therefore it stands to reason that function parameters passed as 'ref' will be mutable by default. :)

Regan