Re: Delegation question...

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sat, 24 May 2008 00:11:07 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<cdb45447-3c8f-4488-8017-07479dbff6ae@y38g2000hsy.googlegroups.com>
On 24 mai, 00:43, Ian Collins <ian-n...@hotmail.com> wrote:

barcaroller wrote:

What is the common way/design-pattern (if any) in C++ for delegating
function calls that are not handled by a certain class. Public
inheritance would be one way but not all classes are meant to inherit
from (e.g. STL).

Example:

    class A
    {
        public:
            foo();
        private:
            set<string> myset;
    }

    A myObj;
    myObj.insert(); // compiler error of course

Is there some mechanism (direct or indirect) where a function that is
not handled by myObj gets delegated to another object (e.g. myset)?


No, C++ does not support this form of delegation.


Not directly. The closest you can come, I think, is to use
private inheritance and using declarations.

Note that this type of delegation is effectively exposing part
of your internals, to some degree. Although significantly
wordier, I rather favor being explicit in forwarding, so that
the complete interface of the object isn't available. Most of
the time, at least; I also have at least one case where the
non-mutable interface of the object is exactly that of
std::vector< std::string > and I can conceive of others. Which
means that I do have to duplicate a lot (including things like
typedef's). But it's not 100% duplication either; I have
iterator typedefed to std::vector<std::string>::const_iterator,
for example.

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