On Tuesday, 16 February 2016 at 06:04:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Monday, 15 February 2016 at 22:48:16 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
rears its head again :-)
Head Const is what C++ has for const, i.e. it is not
transitive, applies to one level only. D has transitive const.
What head const will do for us:
1. make it easy to interface to C++ code that uses const, as
currently it is not very practical to do so, you have to
resort to pragma(mangle)
2. supports single assignment style of programming, even if
the data is otherwise mutable
The downside is, of course, language complexity.
Previously, you stated that we weren't going to do things like
support interacting with C++ templates (aside from specific
instantiations which weren't typed as templates), because it
would mean putting a C++ compiler into D, which you didn't want
to do. But increasingly, it seems like you're heading in the
direction of doing that in an attempt to be able to have
fantastic C++ interoperability. On the one on hand, that seems
great, since being able to have your C++ code work with your D
code is great, but on the other, it seems like it's going to
make it so that D is contaminated by a lot of extra C++ muck
just to be able to interoperate. At some point, we either need
to decide that we're just not going to interoperate with C++ in
some manner and lose out on some capability, or we're going to
need to fully interoperate with C++ and pretty much put a C++
compiler in the D compiler, and I'd prefer that we didn't go
that far.
- Jonathan M Davis
Hahaha. Well, I think it is already happening. Like the
reincarnation of C to C++ story.
