Name: rlT66838 Date: 08/04/97


Having developed a major (>100kloc) client/server application
in Java over the past year, we have found that the lack of a
'const'-like qualifier is one of Java's biggest shortcomings
as far as the language is concerned.

The only way to protect an object, currently, is to clone it
before passing it; however, for obvious reasons, this is unacceptable
in many cases for performance reasons.

The reason this is a serious problem is that it significantly
diminishes our ability to write bulletproof code with Java, since
rogue code can do bad things much more easily.

On the positive side, such a change could be implemented without
affecting existing code.

Anyway, thanks for listening...

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