- From: Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com>
- Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:16:54 -0700
- To: Simetrical <simetrical@gmail.com>
- CC: Brad Kemper <brkemper@comcast.net>, Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>, David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com>, "Håkon Wium Lie" <howcome@opera.com>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>
Simetrical wrote: ... > There *should be* nothing in software default CSS that admins > of a specific installation can't change. Likewise, there *should be* > nothing in a site-wide stylesheet that a particular section can't > change. Constants give flexibility where you *don't* need or want it, > in the highest and most general layers, and take it away where you do, > at the most specific level. I am not sure I understand your concerns. "admins" will be the first people who will benefit from @const. They will define constants. Developers will use them. Constants cannot be overwritten. So "admins" can sleep calmly. In CSS you can overwrite everything. Already. @const gives CSS new feature - ability to define things that cannot be overwritten. So you have more choices: you can use constness and/or you can use variability. That in principle creates more design possibilities including modularity through parametrization. ... > >> For @conts, there is a big benefit of NOT >> allowing any stop along the line to change the values. It is the same reason >> programmers sometimes use constants instead of variables, and why they are >> usually at the beginning of the program code. > > I know of multiple programming languages (Python, bash) with no > concept of constants at all. I know of none with no concept of > variables. Language-enforced constants are totally unnecessary for > programming, and probably they only exist because in compiled > languages they can be more easily optimized than variables which > happen not to change. None of the scenarios you've given have shown > any benefit that I can see from unchangeable constants -- assuming > that local stylesheets come after more global ones, which they > generally do because of how CSS has worked to date. > And I know programming languages that support modularity so have constants. One of them is a next version of JavaScript: http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf by the way. And by the way you should refresh your Python knowledge. You can define immutable class attribute that is exactly 'const' or 'final' if you know Java. -- Andrew Fedoniouk. http://terrainformatica.com
Received on Monday, 30 June 2008 05:17:47 UTC