Re: Community opinion: Public reference to private complex type

From:

Ulrich Eckhardt <eckhardt@satorlaser.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Date:

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:10:22 CST

Message-ID:

<mvn8g4-m4a.ln1@satorlaser.homedns.org>

jehugaleahsa@gmail.com wrote:

It is essentially providing a public reference to a private complex
object. The initial thought was that I could provide a complex object
in the interface of a class without worrying about other programmers
trying to use operator= on it.

I'm not sure what you mean with operator= here, of course you can use that
on references. What you can't do is to reseat references, but I don't think
that matters here...

class complex_type
{
};

class pub_ref
{
     complex_type ct;

public:
     complex_type & ctr;
     pub_ref() : ct(), ctr(ct) {} // remember the ctor rearranges the
init list
};

Can any of you creative thinkers find any problems or additional
applications of this style?

What is the difference to making it public? I think that the interesting
think would be if the reference was const. That way, you could use a
member-access syntax for getting the value but would have to use a function
to set it. Note that some compilers (and languages) extend this to
so-called properties that automatically redirect reading and writing to
getter/setter members, so it seems others consider it an interesting idea.
The problem is that it doesn't work with plain C++ except for the reading
part.

Uli

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