The Status of Const

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Steven Schveighoffer (schveiguy at yahoo.com)'s article
> On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:30:46 -0400, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > == Quote from Jonathan M Davis (jmdavisprog at gmail.com)'s article
> >> On Friday, August 13, 2010 15:03:07 Tomek Sowiński wrote:
> >> > I agree with the content, but not the tone. D's const makes all other
> >> > mainstream const systems look petty. Applying the concept of
> >> transitivity
> >> > has been revolutionary (hail Walter). Tail const is just a cable to
> >> the
> >> > socket to make this wonderful device work out-of-box for programming
> >> > masses.
> >> In pretty much all cases other than references, D's const system is
> >> fantast
> >> ic.
> >> It really simplified things in comparison to C++, and is overall a
> >> definite
> >>
> >> improvement. It's just with references that there's a big problem, and
> >> with
> >>
> >> them, they're better than what you get with Java's final, but it's still
> >> seriously lacking due to the whole thing becoming const instead of just
> >> the
> >>
> >> referent.
> >> - Jonathan M Davis
> >
> > I still don't understand:  What's so bad about Rebindable?  Yes, it's
> > not the
> > syntactically prettiest thing in the world, but complaining about it is
> > like
> > complaining about climbing a molehill when you've got Mount Everest to
> > climb next.
> >  My previous gripe about it was that it didn't support interfaces, but I
> > just
> > realized that Shin Fujishiro fixed this a while back.
> There are other reasons to have tail-const other than classes.  For
> example, there's no equivalent custom-range idiom for const(T)[].  You
> simply can't make a custom range tail-const.
> I admit I haven't used Rebindable much, but last I checked it was severely
> out of date.
> -Steve

Rebindable's gotten a significant facelift lately.  Admittedly there are still
bugs but these are bugs in alias this/opDot, not in rebindable itself.