On Thursday 10 February 2011 21:50:45 so wrote: > > We _must_ have it there, so anyone overriding those functions _must_ > > use it for those functions. They could create non-const versions in > > addition to > > the const ones, > > It is the whole point, they can't.
Hmm. You're right (I just tried it). I was certain that you could. It's the kind of thing that you could do in C++, but I guess that D is pickier about overriding. You can certainly _add_ const, but I guess you can't take it away even if there's also a const version defined. I guess that part of the problem is that I so rarely use classes in D. I usually use structs. I'm sure that will change if I ever get the chance to write large programs in D, but until I can use it at work I'm not sure how likely that is. Well, then there's no caching of toHash unless you call a separate function to calculate and cache the result first, or you use a global variable to hold the cached value. That kind of sucks, but I think that const is far more valuable that the possibility of caching, and there _are_ ways to get the caching behavior in spite of const - they just aren't all that nice. - Jonathan M Davis
