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digitalmars.D - Logic const with lazy const

reply "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
I guess other persons have already suggested something like this. 
Here there is a "lazy immutable" instance member x, that can be 
only in two states: not initialized, and initialized with an 
immutable value.

The type system ensures x is never read before it's written, and 
that it's written no more than once (and to do this I presume it 
needs flow analysis).

The point of this idea is to make the bar() method const despite 
the x instance attribute is computed only if it's needed. This is 
useful is spam() requires significant computations, but x is not 
always needed. So it allows bar() to be "logically const" in a 
verified correct way.


int spam() pure nothrow  safe  nogc {
     // Lot of computations here.
     return 0;
}

struct Foo {
     private lazy immutable int x;
     static assert (this.x.sizeof == 8);

     int bar() const pure nothrow  safe  nogc {
         if (this.x.isNull) {
             this.x = spam();
         }
         return this.x;
     }
}

void main() {}


Bye,
bearophile
Jul 06 2014
next sibling parent Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
On 7/6/2014 7:20 AM, bearophile wrote:

 I guess other persons have already suggested something like this. Here there is
 a "lazy immutable" instance member x, that can be only in two states: not
 initialized, and initialized with an immutable value.


Not specifically. My opinion on logical const isn't consensus, but I believe 
that logical constness is way, way down on the list of things that a type
system 
can productively support. It's easily handled with existing features by using a 
struct.
Jul 06 2014
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Jul 07 2014