Const ref and rvalues again...

[Malte Skarupke]

On Monday, 5 November 2012 at 03:26:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Sunday, November 04, 2012 20:43:36 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 11/4/12 7:58 PM, martin wrote:
>> > I find it sad that while this topic seems to be of high 
>> > priority for
>> > quite a lot of language users, it is seemingly neglected by 
>> > the head of
>> > language development (Walter, Andrei etc.).
>> 
>> I was hoping "auto ref" solves this problem. I think it's 
>> currently only
>> implemented for templates.
>
> And when we argued for altering it so that it operated like 
> const ref in C++
> (which allows const ref in D to continue to function like it 
> does now), some
> folks complained, because they've found the current semantics 
> of auto ref to
> be useful (something to do with propagating the exact, original 
> type, I
> think).
>
> Now, since auto ref currently only works with templates, maybe 
> we can keep its
> current semantics with templated functions but alter them for 
> non-templated
> functions so that it works like const ref does in C++. The 
> downside is that
> the semantics for auto ref between templated functions and 
> non-templated
> functions are slightly different, but they're close enough that 
> I'm not sure
> that it matters.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Yes, please. Auto ref for non-template functions would solve the 
problem exactly. I also like it because then the intent of the 
programmer is clear.