Re: RFC: Demangle partial symbols and save memory too

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com>]

> On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 23:17:55 +0100, Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de> said:
> 
>> David Carlton <carlton@math.stanford.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>>> I also toyed with trying to replace 'struct XXX *' with 'const
>>> struct XXX *' wherever appropriate.  That one's harder, though,
>>> because there are structures in GDB where values are computed
>>> lazily and cached: so not only are there functions that are
>>> logically const but not actually const, but I also worried that
>>> making too many declarations const now would inhibit such caching
>>> in the future.  Maybe in a couple of years we can switch GDB over
>>> to C++ instead of C and use 'mutable'...
> 
> 
>> Even in C casting away const is OK as long as the object isn't
>> read-only in the first place.  You just have to be careful to make
>> sure this is not violated.
> 
> 
> That's a good point.  I don't like casts, of course, but in this
> particular situation my dislike of casts might be trumped by my liking
> of const when logically appropriate.

I'd rather not see such casts.  It is easier to recommend no casts then 
to recommend no casts `but'.

The current objective for const is just with strings - getting GDB past 
-Wwriteable-strings so that we know that all constant strings can be 
moved to the text segment.

Andrew