G'day all.
Quoting "Richard A. O'Keefe"
Just an idiot-level question: so these "constants" are subject to revision, but *how often*?
Good question. For leap seconds: - The data can change no quicker than once every 6 months. - The shortest time between changes was 6 months, and the longest (so far) was 7 years. - The mean change is once every 18 months. - You get just under 6 months' notice before a change comes into effect. (No more, no less.) For most programs, it's the last point that concerns me the most...
What is the actual cost of recompiling and using them *as* constants, compared with the cost of rereading the stuff every time you run the program and passing it around?
...because the main cost probably isn't recompiling, it's redeployment. I don't know about this program in particular, but release cycles longer than six months are hardly uncommon in our business. Cheers, Andrew Bromage