Issue #1001: Add constructor parameters to the list of compile-time known values

[vgurevich]

Added constructor parameters to the list of the compile-time known values. This was an unfortunate omission in the spec.

[QinshiWang]

This is not absolutely true. Sometimes we want values that only dependents on the declaration but not instantiation. See my issue report for more information: https://github.com/p4lang/p4-spec/issues/932.

[jnfoster]

Ahh, I'd forgotten about @QinshiWang's old writeup. Thanks for reminding me. Indeed, if we make this change, we would certainly not be able to do modular type checking. Perhaps there is a multi-pass, whole-program analysis that would be sound, but it'd be super complex and we've never written it down. I think there are good reasons to avoid it.

So we need to discuss this...

[jnfoster]

We discussed this again at the April '22 meeting. @QinshiWang and @jnfoster will discuss and come back to the group with a proposal for going forward...

[mihaibudiu]

This will be superseded by #1213

[mihaibudiu]

The main question is whether we merge this until we finalize #1213

[jnfoster]

In the interest of tidying up the set of active issues on the P4 specification repository, I'm marking this as "stalled" and closing it. Of course, we can always re-open it in the future if there is interest in resurrecting it.