Static attributes & immutability, static attributes seen from instances

[bearophile]

This was a discussion I've started in the digitalmars.D.learn newsgroup, but div0 has suggested to move it here for a more general public.

This is a reduced version of a D2 program, written while I was trying to use/learn immutability. This program compiles:


struct Foo {
    static int x;
}
void main() {
    immutable Foo f;
    Foo.x++;
    f.x++;
}


My idea was that immutable applied to a struct makes every thing in such struct namespace immutable. I was wrong, but what do you think about changing a little how D works here?
A possible idea is: if one instance is 'const', then the static attribute x is seen as const from just that instance. If one instance is set to 'immutable' as here, then the static attributes become immutable in every instance of Foo.


A bit later in the discussion div0 and Pelle M. have said/suggested that accessing static vars through an instance can be a bad thing, and it's better to allow the programmer to access them only through the class/struct name.

Bye,
bearophile