Name: Anonymous 2011-11-26 4:35
use a language that supported objects that could reference other objects, but the references could never be changed to refer to different objects after instantiation? Primitives likes ints and bytes inside of objects could be changed all you wanted. You could have pointers allocated on the stack that point to objects on the heap, and the pointers on the stack could be changed arbitrarily. Insisting that pointers inside of objects always remain constant since instantiation would make it impossible for a cyclic references to occur, so reference counting could be used for general garbage collection in this scenario. So would you use such a language? Or would it be silly, restrictive, and ultimately a waste of your time?