const foo& - what is const - ReferenceType or ReferenceType::baseType?

[Milian Wolff]

David Nolden, 02.03.2011:
> 2011/3/2 Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de>:
> > Hey David,
> > 
> > just spotted an issue in the shortenedTypeIdentifier, it checks whether
> > the identifier is a const ref using this code:
> > 
> >  bool isReference = false;
> >  bool isConstReference = false;
> >  if(type.cast<ReferenceType>()) {
> >    isReference = true;
> >    isConstReference = type.cast<ReferenceType>()->modifiers() &
> > AbstractType::ConstModifier;
> >    type = type.cast<ReferenceType>()->baseType();
> >  }
> > 
> > But the reality shows: Not the ReferenceType is const, but it's baseType!
> > So I'll fix it here, but I wonder whether this could not be hit
> > elsewhere? Should the ReferenceType maybe return the same modifiers as
> > it's baseType to prevent such problems?
> 
> This has changed with time. The way it is now, it is more logical,
> because it is the same as with pointers. The difference is that a
> reference cannot be constant at all in our sense, because references
> are always constant, they cannot be changed to point to something
> different after they were initialized. Well, maybe it would be good to
> return the modifiers of the baseType in ReferenceType::modifiers,
> because a ReferenceType cannot have modifiers at all. However this
> would be slightly ugly, because it wouldn't be consistent with
> "setModifiers", so we should probably keep everything as it is. Also
> there might be other languages where reference-types _can_ take
> const-modifiers.
> 
> Most places should handle this properly though. Would be nice if you
> could add a unit-test to make sure this fix stays.

will do. thanks for the clarification.

bye
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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