From 8820454624277435239 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f78e5,fe6310a7fb6a4c8c X-Google-Attributes: gidf78e5,public From: David R Tribble Subject: Re: const int& or int const& Date: 1998/02/09 Message-ID: <34DE9758.4DAB@flash.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 323481574 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <34D8AD3C.5C38416B@heidelbg.ibm.com> <34D9D6B5.30EE@central.beasys.com> <34DBE467.521EA970@vizdom.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Originator: clamage@taumet X-NNTP-Posting-Host: dasc27-83.flash.net X-UID: 0000000001 X-Status: $$$T Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Flashnet Communications, http://www.flash.net Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ I, David R Tribble wrote: > > There seems to be a minority of programmers who insist on > > placing the 'const' specifier of a type after the type, such > > as 'int const' instead of 'const int'. Personally I abhor this > > style; it's just another way to confuse people and is a break from > > well-accepted practice that's been around for several years now. John Lacey wrote: > The entire declaration syntax is regrettable and confusing. > > The reason for the behavior of the minority, as I'm sure David > knows, is that "const" is a postfix qualifier, except when it > appears in the left-most position. I can buy that. But tradition is tradition, and we must also consider what we teach beginning programmers. I've always felt that too many ways to state the same thing was a bad idea; you need to learn two or more syntaxes for the same thing, but what have you gained with this extra knowledge? In many situations, two ways is one too many. > Two questions come to mind. Is there a good reason why "const" is > postfix rather than prefix? There had to be a way to specify constant pointers without breaking the existing syntax for pointers to constant objects. Hence, we have 'type *const' and 'const type *', respectively (and 'const type *const' for cases of both). > Also, does volatile behave the same > way, or does it behave like a storage-class specifier, despite > being listed in the grammar, along with const, as a > type-qualifier? 'volatile' is syntactically identical to 'const'. (In C9X, the new qualifier 'restrict' acts this way, too.) They share common ground semantically, so it makes sense that they should be syntactically similar. But 'mutable' is a storage-class specifier like 'static' [7.1.1], even though it arguably shares some semantics with 'const'. Strange, no? ______________________________________________________________________ David R. Tribble dtribble@technologist.com dtribble@flash.net http://www.flash.net/~dtribble/ [ comp.std.c++ is moderated. To submit articles, try just posting with ] [ your news-reader. If that fails, use mailto:std-c++@ncar.ucar.edu ] [ --- Please see the FAQ before posting. --- ] [ FAQ: http://reality.sgi.com/austern_mti/std-c++/faq.html ]