[C++-sig] working around the non-const Python C API (original) (raw)

David Abrahams dave at boost-consulting.com
Sat Dec 3 00:39:41 CET 2005

Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> writes:

[Jeremy Hylton]

... Secondarily, I know that python-dev is a bit hesitant about const correctness, but we did get some const char* types added with the new bytecode compiler. Perhaps it's worthwhile to try changing a few of the most egregious cases to use const char*. Nobody will complain about adding const where its lack gets in the way. What python-dev doesn't want is another of those massive checkins where someone more-or-less mindlessly adds const to every place they can find, introducing a handful of subtle bugs along the way that create new problems for years.

I'm not, by any means, advocating slash-and-burn checkins, but... unless 'C' has adopted overloading while I wasn't looking (and no, I don't mean the new magic C99 builtin numeric function overloads), it's hard to imagine what kind of problems you could introduce in `C' code by changing char* to char const* that wouldn't be caught at compile-time.

-- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com

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