const?? When and why? This is ugly!

[Lutger]

hasen wrote:

> Walter Bright wrote:
>> grauzone wrote:
>>> I didn't mean going back to programming with locks. Instead you could 
>>> use the new ideas without extending the type system. As far as I 
>>> understand, the language extensions are only needed for verification 
>>> (so far).
>> 
>> Without verification, it's programming by hopeful convention. If you 
>> want a reliable system, you need more than hope <g>.
> 
> Well .. if you think about OOP and private/public ..
> 
> Dynamic languages like python and smalltalk don't enforce 
> private/public, and that never was a problem. And, smalltalk is *the* OO 
> language (AFAIK)
> 
> (this is not really an argument against const per se, it's just an 
> argument against an argument for const)

If you have a dynamic language you have a different way of programming. In D 
when I make a typo, the compiler catches it. When I do the same in Ruby, I 
have a unit test that spits out a method missing exception with a trace. 
Suppose D doesn't catch my typo and then my application crashes at runtime 
without such a trace, that will be a nightmare.