Re: inline request and compiler rejection
On Mar 19, 11:40 pm, Jeff Schwab <j...@schwabcenter.com> wrote:
James Kanze wrote:
Inlining increases coupling.
Not, it doesn't, except in an extremely shallow sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by "shallow". It increases compile
time coupling significantly, which is extremely important in
anything except trivially small applications.
Furthermore, changing the signature of an inline function, in
any syntactically and semantically backward-compatible way,
requires only one source change for an inline function, but
two changes for a non-inline function.
But why would you change the signature if you don't change the
contract. And if you change the contract, you have to at least
look at every place the function is used. A lot more than just
one or two places.
That's why the desicion to change the signature usually rests in
other hands than the desicion to change the implementation, and
why it is important that the implementation and the signature
reside in different files.
Moreover, separating the definition from the prototype has a
staggering syntactic overhead in C++, particularly for member
functions and templates.
It could be simpler, but I've never found it to be a particular
problem. And I don't know how you can maintain the public
interface and the implementation in two separate files
otherwise. (Of course, a good tool set helps here; you don't
actually write the boilerplate yourself, the machine does it for
you.)
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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