Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!scherzo!allegra!alice!bs
From: bs@alice.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: const, reference "this" revisited ???
Summary: an open question
Message-ID: <7684@alice.UUCP>
Date: 11 Feb 88 02:32:30 GMT
References: <6590015@hplsla.HP.COM> <1988Feb9.101643.2495@mntgfx.mentor.com>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 20
Posted: Wed Feb 10 21:32:30 1988




	Archie Lachner from Mentor Graphics Corporation writes

 > Efficiency issues aside, it would be nice to have some mechanism by which
 > one could specify which member functions were legal for use with constant
 > objects and which were legal only for non-constants.  For example, it is
 > not now currently possible to specify that the member function "operator=()"
 > should not be applied to constants.  The mechanism of optionally specifying
 > "this" as an argument to a member function could conceivably be used to solve
 > this problem.

	I don't think that there is an efficiency issue (that is, there may
	be an issue over the efficiency of a given implementation - cfront
	output is only as efficient as the equivalent C, it could be more
	efficient - but there is no need for new language features to support
	even further speedups), but there certainly is a need to review the
	relation between ``const objects'' and member functions. I'm not
	yet quite sure how to deal with that issue. Ideas?