Hmm - about manifest/enum

[Janice Caron]

On 1/2/08, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> That anyone got persuaded that something is wrong is not proof that it is
> wrong.

For clarification, what persuaded me was /logic/, not the force of
Walter's personality! :-)

Unless I have misunderstood some step of the reasoning, every scheme
to allow mutable-reference-to-const-class-data which has so far been
proposed has been proven unworkable. The same logic should lead you,
or anyone else, to the same conclusion.

Of course, this is not a proof that there is /no/ solution, only that
the suggestions made up to this point all have fatal flaws.


> "this leads to different problems" is not an explanation.

Of course not. I'm hardly going to condense six months' worth of
patient reasoning into a single sentence. You're proposing something
which has already been proposed before (by me, as it happens), and has
been shown not to work.


> If C isn't a reference type, then it doesn't compile.

That was my suggestion too. In the thread "const again", I said "I had
in mind that that would be a syntax error", to which Walter replied "A
special syntax for class types means that one has to know that type T
is a class." And this is the flaw here: It must compile without
knowing what T is.