On December 14, 1990 I posted a message in preparation for submission
to the ANSI committee, proposing the addition of a type-specifier
"~const".  The primary purpose of ~const would be to permit caching
member variables.  For your convenience, the original posting is
included as the last part of this message.

In the next few messages I summarize the reactions.  This message
should be treated as a sort of index to the next few.  I hope people
prefer many short messages, with visible headers, to one long one!  I
feel OK about doing this in a relatively low-traffic newsgroup.

I would appreciate any further comments from those interested.  If I
get no comments back, I will write up the final proposal (expounding
on issues that X3J16 would like to see addressed in proposals), post
it to this group, and also mail it to the committee.

    *  General reactions:  positive.
    *  Alternative ways to accomplish what ~const does:  dual classes,
       cast-from-const.
    *  Fate of cast-from-const:  keep it but deprecate it.
    *  Generalizations of ~const-like syntax:  ~volatile, ~register,
       ~virtual, ~inline.
    *  Name:  maybe make it !const.

    *  Compiler complexity:  not addressed in responses.
    *  Experience:  not addressed in responses.

Many thanks for the reactions, and apologies for not following up
earlier.  These past few weeks have been very busy!
--
  Tom Ngo
  ngo@harvard.harvard.edu
  617/495-1768 lab number, leave message