Should Element store a constant pointer to the mesh?

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp

Research direction

Start by inspecting the Element and RangeSetBase classes and the existing constant-reference iteration behavior. Trace every place these classes use their mesh pointers to determine whether non-constant mesh access is required; done means documenting the remaining requirements and confirming whether both pointers can safely become pointers to constant meshes.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I have noticed that it is currently not possible to iterate over the elements of a constant reference - even if it is read only. However it seems to me that there is no reason for the Element and RangeSetBase class to store a nonconstant pointer. Note that this does NOT mean, that the pointer cannot change, we can still set it to nullptr or a different mesh - only the value that the pointer points to cannot, i.e. we would not be allowed to change element.getMesh()

I have implemented this for the Element class and it seems to work flawlessly. Is there any point where the elements require non-constant references?

Dominant language
C++
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Forks
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