const?? When and why? This is ugly!

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-03-07 18:19:50 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu 
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:

> Later on I decided to save the filename for error message reporting and 
> the such. Now I had two choices:
> 
> (1) Leave the signature unchanged and issue an idup:
> 
> this.filename = to!string(filename); // issues an idup
> 
> (2) Change the signature to
> 
> this(string filename);

Third choice: have two contructors.

	this(in char[] filename) { this(filename.idup); }
	this(string filename) { ... }

It's pretty easy to add a new version of a construcor or function when 
you change things and need to keep backward compatibility. The question 
is: should you?

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/