Okay, what happened to my literal strings?

[Reiner Pope]

Burton Radons wrote:
> Ah, so 'const char [] foo = "bar";' works, does it? No thank you. Const 
> forcing (whatever the name given) is the kind of tiddlywinks 
> obsessive-compulsive bullshit that can't even be enforced so it's 
> useless to everybody* which caused me to flee from C++. I've been using 
> D as my primary language for... five years and four months now, and this 
> lack has not resulted in a bug once. Needless to say, C++'s const didn't 
> save me from a single bug either, but instead wasted my time (just like 
> a bug does - the irony of many mollycoddling features is that they cause 
> you to spend more time dealing with them than you would to deal with the 
> bugs, if they even existed) by having me pour over code inserting const 
> or casts everywhere like the virus it is.
> 
> This is _significantly_ against what I want from a language, and while 
> I'm not sure how I'll feel in a day or two, my current inclination is to 
> move on to another language or write my own. The many megabytes of code 
> to retrofit don't help either.
> 
> * Some might be deluded into thinking it's useful to them for 
> optimisation, bug prevention, or interface contracts. But the only thing 
> circumventable const forcing does with any faculty is provide 
> self-documentation, and even there the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty 
> awful, it's easily abused (methods are frequently declared const in C++ 
> when it's not a true requirement of what the method does, and it 
> prevents situations where the method really is const but also modifies 
> the object's data, which is not a paradox - the data might be cached or 
> synthesized), often fraudulent, and usually not enforceable by the 
> method. This is well-discussed and it seemed to be how Walter felt 
> originally, so if someone can point out anything specific which changed 
> his mind I'd be interested in seeing it.

You can always use "literal".dup if you don't want to use const. But 
you've never been *allowed* to modify string literals in D anyway, since 
they may be placed in ROM (eg on Linux). Making them invariant makes 
sense, then, as it expresses the already-present rule.

   -- Reiner