Did languages before Rust have inherited mutability?

1

Inherited mutability has some big advantages, because it makes code:

  • simpler to write, because it prevents some classes of concurrency bugs.
  • easier to understand, e.g. regarding what a function is doing with its parameters.
  • more optimizable.

Despite this, languages like C and Javascript only have shallow constants (I think.) Are there any languages before Rust that have this kind of mutability guarantee?

2

I'm not sure I'm understanding the term "inherited mutability" correctly. From what I could find searching the Internet, it seems to mean that fields of a struct inherit the mutability of the struct that they are a part of, but that each field may still override this inherited property.

If that interpretation is correct, then I'd say that C++ definitely has inherited mutability, nothwithstanding a different "default mutability".

class Foo {
public:
    /// `inherited` is const if `Foo` is const, otherwise non-const.
    int inherited;

    /// `overridden_const` is always const, no matter `Foo`'s status.
    const int overridden_const;

    /// `overridden_mut` is always non-const, no matter `Foo`'s status.
    mutable int overridden_mut;
};

I think this feature does not translate to C, where structs are really just grab-bags of fields.

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3

Depends how strongly you interpret "guarantee". C++ definitely has (2), as you can define a parameter as vector<int> const& to communicate that you're only planning on reading from it, and the vector class itself doesn't offer mutation of its internals when it's const itself.

But C++ has const_cast, which means that (3) is basically impossible in general. And it doesn't have borrowck, so you can have multiple mutable T& to the same thing, so it doesn't help with (1).

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4

Something something something "ST monad" something something.

That said, C++ gets closer than any other language I can think of; it's the only language I know that has a concept of immutability built into the language that even vaguely resembles that of rust.

In many languages, the only way you can have a immutable value is by defining a new type that has no public API for mutation. I mean, that's basically the sole reason why Python's tuple exists. JavaScript/Java have keywords called const/final, respectively, though I prefer to call them a joke. (they prevent you from reassigning the binding and... uh, that's it)

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5

Ada has the constant keyword which guarantees that records do not change during their lifetime.

Edit
Also many functional languages are inherently immutable (no side-effects) and changing values is only possible by creating new objects.