Re: Combining mutable objects with const references

On Apr 23, 4:24 pm, Joachim Durchholz <j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> That depends.
> If efficiency is your goal, then you're probably right. But then you
> probably should be coding in assembly.
> If maintainability is your goal, then you're probably not right.

The kind of object use I am refering to is not optimization. Suppose
my object is a car in a game and its position (my point p) changes
every time the game engine calculates a new position for the car. Of
course we would not create a new car object every twenty milliseconds.
Every time an imperative programmer destructively updates an object,
he is using an object whose previous values he knows he will not have
to refer to later. So these types of object are very common.

There are other types of object where you will want to construct a new
one, perhaps which is based on another object, but is still
conceptually a new object. Then as the programmer you would just use a
constructor. I am not suggesting you would destructively update in
this situation, just because you thought you could probably save on
memory.