Re: Templates and inheritance: Double dependancy

From:
Greg Herlihy <greghe@mac.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 2 Jan 2008 18:11:12 CST
Message-ID:
<09c8378a-ac5f-432e-a488-c825cefb2210@1g2000hsl.googlegroups.com>
On Dec 29 2007, 3:45 pm, Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote:

On 28 Des, 20:46, Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote:

I am trying to implement a red-black binary tree in terms of
of an overloaded binary tree class.

...

One idea which seems attractive is to code a template
specfication like

template<class T, class U>

where the template U is somehow expanded to
either TreeNode<T> or RBTreeNode<T> as
required.


I have experimented a bit, and one approach which *seems*
to work is

template<class T, class U = TreeNode<T> >
class BinaryTree{
    U* Buffer_;

};

template<class T, class U = RBTreeNode<T> >
class RBBinaryTree : public BinaryTree<T,U>{
    U* Buffer_;

};


Note that in the above declarations, RBBinaryTree ends up with two
Buffer_ member variables - one hding the other.

Furthermore, I don't see why RBinaryTree should accept a second type
parameter (specifying the node type). Doesn't an RBBinaryTree<T>
require an RBTreeNode<T> as its node type? In other words, I would
expect:

     template <class T, class U = TreeNode<T> >
     class BinaryTree
     {
        typedef U NodeType;
        NodeType * Buffer_;

     };

     template <class T>
     class RBBinaryTree : public BinaryTree<T, RBTreeNode<T> >
     {
        // ,,,
     };

After all, the type parameter list of a class template - should not
allow type arguments that are more generic than its implementation can
actually support. Or, to paraphrase Einstein: "A class template should
be as generic as possible - but not more so." :-)

Greg

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