Re: containers tentative design summary

[Brian Gough <bjg at network-theory dot co dot uk>]

At Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:40:30 -0400,
James Bergstra wrote:
> If the purpose is to protect the user from accidentally messing around
> with data then, as Gerard suggests, maybe we shouldn't bother.  This
> is not a battle that we can win in C.  Good naming conventions for
> functions, which indicate the arguments that will be modified, is the
> most that a C library is expected to provide.

The purpose is to make programs safer, rather than provide any hints
for optimisation.  The current system is type-safe and gives a
"discarding const" compiler warning if people try to pass const
objects to functions as non-const arguments - these seem like useful
features.  It's not clear to me what the actual benefit would be if we
only had non-const vectors and matrices.