Preserving const? -- A potential solution

[Christopher Wright]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
> Tim M wrote:
>> Firstly option 2 was just crazy and I don't know why you said that.
> 
> Because it's how .NET does it.  Granted, .NET doesn't really have
> templates; just deferred type erasure.  Still, it's basically the same idea.

This is a much easier feature to support, assuming you have sufficient 
reflection. You'd output some type constraints for the metadata on the 
generic element. On instantiation of a generic method, the runtime would 
check the given type against those constraints. Local variables of the 
generic type would be stored in an array on the heap, perhaps, or you 
could extend the stack as necessary. Methods and properties would all be 
accessed via reflection.

Dog slow, and it only works out as syntactic sugar. It isn't worthwhile.