Re: Lang. Design Query (no practical value)

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

My taste is that it is not useful to indicate the parameter modes at
the call site. The names chosen and the abstraction, should make this
clear. I have never found it a problem. If you really wnat this kind
of information at the call site, you could adopt a convention of
encoding it into the names.

Note also that in the important case, which is the case of pointers,
you still do not know the "mode" of the thing you are pointing at (i.e.
whether the called procedure or functoin will simply read the designated
object, or whether it will modify it, so since you are not solving this
problem, I don't think the new syntax is worthwhile.

The reason this was dropped was that in general people agree with the
above point of view, no great mystery here!