Const sucks

[Russell Lewis]

Walter Bright wrote:
 > (snip)
> o  static const/invariant means the initializer is evaluated at compile 
> time. non-static const/invariant means it is evaluated at run time.

I'd like to suggest that we use some keyword other than "static."  Yeah, 
I know that "static" can imply "static analysis" (compile time), but the 
static modifier on a variable has a well-known meaning from C: it's not 
exported.  I think that that was a poor design choice in C, but now 
we're stuck with millions of programmers who expect it.

I think that this would just cause confusion, and perhaps we need a new 
keyword to express this new concept.  While I understand that we don't 
want to multiply keywords, multiplying concepts, and then overloading 
them all into a single keyword, is, IMHO, even worse.

> o  no initializer means it is assigned in the corresponding constructor.
> 
> o  const/invariant declarations will always allocate memory (so their 
> addresses can be taken)
> 
> o  So, we still need a method to declare a constant that will not 
> consume memory. We'll co-opt the future macro syntax for that:
> 
>     macro x = 3;
>     macro s = "hello";

How about "inline"?  That seems to clearly express what we want to 
express (there is a clear parallel between inline functions and inline 
constants).

I don't recall: is inline a keyword in D or not?