Re: Why can't we make reference variables?

[Tommi]

On Wednesday, 29 August 2012 at 00:34:02 UTC, cal wrote:
On Wednesday, 29 August 2012 at 00:21:29 UTC, Tommi wrote:
In this situation, I think, the most convenient and sensible 
thing to do is to make a reference to the data, and use that 
reference multiple times. We could make a pointer, but then 
we'd be stuck with the nasty syntax of dereferencing:

This works currently:

struct Test
{
    void foo() const
    {
        writeln("FOO");
    }
}

void main()
{
    immutable(Test)* ptr = new immutable(Test);
    ptr.foo();
}

Now, that's a surprise for someone coming from C++. But even 
though ptr looks like a reference variable in your example, it 
doesn't look like it at all in this example:

void main()
{
    int counter = 0;

    auto notQuiteRefCounter = &counter;

    // Increments the pointer, not counter value
    ++notQuiteRefCounter;

    // Can't do this
//  int counterBackup = notQuiteRefCounter;

    // Prints deref: 0   no-deref: 18FD34
    writefln("deref: %s  no-deref: %s",
             *notQuiteRefCounter,
              notQuiteRefCounter);
}