Walter Bright:
Actually, I think inference of the ability to implicitly and safely convert from mutable to immutable or shared to be very powerful. I also think it is superior than requiring the user to add ever more annotations, which some research (and my experience) shows that users are reluctant to do.
I agree the people are reluctant to add annotations, but I think it's also depends on the return of investment of the specific annotation. I am annotating all my code carefully with "pure", but the ROI of all those purity annotations is not great.
And I agree the piling of special cases is a not clean design. It's now simpler to ask the compiler if a certain assignment to immutable is allowed or not. Because I can't remember the supported cases.
So I suggest a more principled and visible approach at the problem of ownership and uniqueness.
Bye, bearophile
