On 13-05-2012 18:39, Stewart Gordon wrote:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1824
This has gone on for too long.
Object.toString, .toHash, .opCmp and .opEquals should all be const.
(It's also been stated somewhere that they should be pure and nothrow,
or something like that, but I forget where.)
This makes it a nightmare to use const objects in data structures, among
other things, at best forcing the use of ugly workarounds. There are
probably other, more serious effects of this that can't easily be worked
around.
It seems that the main obstacle is rewriting the relevant methods in
std.stream. The current implementation doesn't make sense anyway -
reading the entire contents of a file is certainly not the way to
generate a hash or string representation of the stream. I'm thinking the
hash should probably be the stream handle, and the string representation
could perhaps be the full pathname of the file. Of course, what it
should be for non-file streams is another matter. (This would be a
change at the API level, but when the API's as fundamentally flawed as
this....)
Are there any other bits of druntime/Phobos that need to be sorted out
before these methods can be declared const/pure/nothrow once and for all?
Stewart.
I agree with everything but toString(). I'm afraid that forcing
toString() to be const will have harm flexibility severely. Can't we do
better, somehow?
--
- Alex
