Re: RFC: Demangle partial symbols and save memory too

[David Carlton <carlton@math.stanford.edu>]

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.

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu