Hmm - about manifest/enum

[Janice Caron]

On 1/1/08, Bill Baxter <dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote:
> Janice Caron wrote:
> >
> > It is. I know that's not immediately obvious, but if you follow
> > through all the arguments (which I don't want to repeat coz they're
> > long and complicated) you eventually have to conclude it can't be
> > done.
>
> It would be great if someone who understands it could write down the
> rationale that lead to the current system.  I'm not very convinced by
> "trust me I thought of everything".  Even when it's myself who thinks he
> thought of everything, I don't really believe it till I write it all
> down and see that the reasoning still stands up.

Quite right. I absolutely agree completely. No one should ever be
convinced by "trust me I thought of everything".

The rationale that leads to the current system is in this forum
though. It's /a lot/ of reading. It essentially consists of all of the
arguments and counterarguments about const that have gone on in the
past several months.

For this /particular/ piece of the argument, the next stage of
reasoning would likely go like this:

A: It is an unacceptable omission that there is no way to specify
mutable reference to const class data
B: Then let us proceed by reductio ad absurdum. Please unambiguously
specify exactly what you want, and then I will show that it leads to a
contradiction.

A is then either unable to unambiguously specify exactly what they
want, or the argument proceeds to the next stage. But eventually, it
will hit a brick wall.