Re: Class objects work like built-in types, but is it worth it?

From:
acehreli@gmail.com
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:49:33 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<dd1617ed-f721-4f08-8a5e-93fba5edd41b@f37g2000pri.googlegroups.com>
Fat fingers! :) The post went out incomplete.

On Oct 23, 10:44 am, acehr...@gmail.com wrote:

On Oct 23, 10:38 am, tonytech08 <tonytec...@gmail.com> wrote:

The question is about the value of class objects
behaving like built-in types: How valuable/beneficial/desireable is
that? Or more specifically, was it worth introducing all that
ancillary machinery (exceptions) to get that feature?


I am not convinced that exceptions were introduced so that we could
say

  MyType m;

I read the Design and Evolution of C++ a long time ago but don't
remember registering anything like that. Perhaps all objects could be
pointers and NULL could be returned?

  MyType * m = new MyType();


[I was going to add...]

Then we would have to check every object creation:

if (!m) // cannot continue

We wouldn't be able to chain function calls:

  calculate(make_first(), make_second());

It should be done noisily:

  FirstType * f = make_first();
  if (!f) goto bail;

  SecondType * s = make_second();
  if (!s) goto bail;

  calculate(f, s);

That would be C-like in a bad way. :)

Can you think of a better way without exceptions from constructors?

Ali

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