Graham St Jack wrote:
For me, the key problem is that a class object reference has the same
const/immutable/shared attribute as the object on the heap that it
refers to. This is sometimes what you need, but more often you want a
non-shared, mutable reference to a const/immutable/shared object.
I struggled with this for a long while before I eventually came to the
conclusion that I was thinking about class objects as a reference and the
instance, and that those two were separable concepts. They are not. A reference
type is implicitly treated like a value type as far as accessing its members go.
Trying to separate out the two is a fundamental misunderstanding of what
reference types are all about. Semantically, they are much more than just a
pointer to the instance.
You can achieve this with pointers for arrays, structs and primitive
types, but not with classes because a class pointer is just a pointer to
a reference.
The way to do it with class is take a pointer to the class:
class C { ... }
const(C)*[]; // array of pointers to const classes
just like you'd do with a struct.
