On 12/8/2014 12:54 PM, Dicebot wrote:
On Monday, 8 December 2014 at 19:44:48 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I agree it's a seductively simple idea. The trouble starts happening when you
start when making ref idempotent, when ref can only be at the 'head' of a data
structure, when trying to do type deduction of a ref type (do you get the ref,
or do you look 'through' the ref?), what happens with overloading, etc., and
on and on.
But was there any reason why those traits (alien to type qualifiers) were
pursued? What is the problem with `ref` simply meaning `non-null pointer` and
allowing non-idempotent ref(ref(int))?
Because it isn't just a non-null pointer (and ref's can still be null in C++!),
it's an auto-dereferencing pointer.
