Changed tutorial documentation referring to 'constant' to 'immutable' #8056
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dom96
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Jun 17, 2018
doc/tut1.rst
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| @@ -208,7 +208,7 @@ Note that declaring multiple variables with a single assignment which calls a | |||
| procedure can have unexpected results: the compiler will *unroll* the | |||
| assignments and end up calling the procedure several times. If the result of | |||
| the procedure depends on side effects, your variables may end up having | |||
| different values! For safety use only constant values. | |||
| different values! For safety use only immutable values. | |||
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huh, this is a gotcha that I wasn't even aware of. To be honest I don't really understand this last sentence, if you want to avoid this gotcha then surely you should only call side effect free procedures.
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Yes, wouldn't this be better stated as "For safety use side-effect free procedures when using this technique"?
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I agree, in fact changing it to 'immutable' doesn't really make sense here, the problem isn't mutability it is the side-effect dependency.
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In reading the tutorial, there were a couple places where the word 'constant' was used in a colloquial sense. Since Nim defines constants in a technical sense to be values which must be known at compile time, I believe it would be more accurate to use the term 'immutable' in these places.