On Tuesday, March 26, 2013 22:55:56 Minas Mina wrote: > Why is "const ref" not a good choice?
I really don't want to get into that again. There have been a number of discussions on it in the main newsgroup which you can search for, but Andrei considers it to be a major mistake of C++ that const& accepts rvalues, and he does not want to repeat that in D. So, just like ref, const ref in D accepts only lvalues (they're just const instead of mutable), and that's not going to change. auto ref was introduced specifically to solve the problem of having a function take either lvalues or rvalues efficiently, but Walter misunderstood how Andrei meant for it to work, and the way Walter implemented it only works with templated functions. But we can't change how it works, because it turns out that the way it was implemented has other benefits with regards to forwarding the types of arguments. We have a good idea of how to implement what auto ref should have been. We just need a new attribute for it. It's really not that complicated. It just requires a good name. - Jonathan M Davis
