On Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:49:43 +0300, Don <[email protected]> wrote:

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 6/17/11 1:56 AM, Kagamin wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

This has sparked an interesting discussion, to which I added my
bit.

int fun(int a) pure { if (a > 10) writeln("I'm impure); }

As I understand, even if some calls to a function have some
repeatability properties, this doesn't mean the function is pure. In
this example fun is obviously impure. Here one can talk about
allowing to call impure functions from pure ones, but that's a way
different task.
Right. I gave that example within the context of the discussion, which considered purity a path-sensitive property. By that definition, if fun is provably never invoked with a > 10, then it's effectively pure.
 Andrei

And that's an interesting thing about CTFE: although it can never do anything impure, it can call impure functions, provided it avoids the impure bits of them:

int foo(int n)
{
    static int x = 56;
    if (n<10)
        return n;
    ++x;
    return x;
}

static assert(n(5) == 5);

Likewise, it can never doing anything unsafe, but can call unsafe functions.

bool bar(int n)
{
    if (n < 2) return true;
    corruptTheStack();
    return false;
}

static assert(bar(1));

I was wondering if you could not implement [weak] purity in the language so that it requires the programmer to use contracts to insure that side effects newer happen. I would imagine that this should work with the semantic analysis the compiler provides without adding a specialized theorem prover.

(Note: my knowledge of compilers and semantic analysis is fairly limited so ignore this if it is plain stupid).
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