On 12/29/14 3:42 PM, Dicebot wrote:
On Monday, 29 December 2014 at 20:20:45 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
But this precludes doing anything with a mutable t inside foo, since
inout means "const within the function".
Hm, yes, this is indeed quite the problem. I have totally forgot that
compiler has no means of figuring out which invocation of inout is
currently used.
But something very similar feels necessary to me. There is constness,
lifetime, purity - inventing new dedicated keyword for each case does
not feel like scaling approach. Especially when existing one is named so
generic.
My original inkling was to name it scoped const or sconst, since that's
what the proposal was originally named. The idea to use inout was
because of the allergic reaction all the maintainers had at the time to
adding any new keywords -- inout was fully superseded by ref, and
technically "available" without introducing any new keywords. I almost
wish we had never named it that, but I was too happy to have the feature
at the time.
I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to investigate a new way to express
attributes, but I think no matter what we do, we need to rein in the
explosion of attributes that needs to be put on every function.
-Steve
