Re: eliminating or reducing use of "mutable" keyword?

[John W. Eaton]

On 11/18/19 3:03 PM, Rik wrote:
> jwe,
>
> I saw your recent changeset
>
> changeset:   27709:0a84a7d0998d
> user:        John W. Eaton <address@hidden>
> date:        Mon Nov 18 11:57:51 2019 -0500
> summary:     don't declare figure::properties::toolkit as mutable
>
> which removes an instance of the mutable keyword.
>
> Should we make this a Task on Savannah?  The use of mutable seems very
> occasionally necessary, but also very often a hack where it might be better
> to re-think the code.
>
> I used grep and found 53 instances of the word in libinterp/ and 8 in
> liboctave/.  The ones in libinterp are clustered in the MeX interface which
> probably isn't worth scrubbing.

Yes, I think we should aim to remove all uses of mutable if possible. 
In cases where it seems like it can't be removed, it would probably be 
worth documenting and justifying why it is really needed.

jwe