Jonathan M Davis:
Andrei suggested auto ref to fix this problem, and Walter
implemented it, but he misunderstood what Andrei had meant,
I missed this detail of the story :-)
Walter has suggested that we just redefine ref itself to do
what I just
described rather than using auto ref or defining a new
attribute. However,
both Andrei and I argued with him quite a bit over that,
because that makes it
so that you can't tell whether a ref argument is intended to
mutate what's
being passed in, or whether it's just an optimization
I think Ada was designed like that, and then have had to fix the
language. So it's not a good idea.
Bye,
bearophile
