On Wednesday, 13 February 2019 at 16:40:18 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
So ironically, the iron-clad semantics of D's const system turns out to be also its own downfall.
Such things are not ironic. There is always a trade off. You get nothing for free in this universe. Physics tells us this. Conservation laws apply to energy and everything is energy. Hence your computer cannot violate these laws nor can the D specification(whatever it ends up meaning) nor can the D const system, so to speak...
That is, any time there something is inversely related to something else then there will be a conservation relationship. If you restrict something too much then something else in direct opposition is becoming too unrestricted.
It's not that D's const system is bad, it is that it creates too much restriction without any other option. The usual way too solve these problems is granularity. this way you can choose the right tool for the job.
Maybe D needs different levels of const. constN where constN can always be cast to constn for n <= N. One would need to properly define the levels to maximize utility and minimize the granularity. D probably only needs 3-5 levels to be effective.
