Re: Const constructor

From:
Keith H Duggar <duggar@alum.mit.edu>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:05:06 CST
Message-ID:
<4b0c1c3e-e139-47c1-85d6-353e416ab165@q37g2000vbi.googlegroups.com>
On Jun 21, 1:49 pm, Fabio <fabio.canni...@gmail.com> wrote:

Instead of using built-in pointer you can define your own smart
pointer that propagates const from pointer to the pointee. For
example following Marco Manfredini's suggestion:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/browse_frm/thr...

    template<class T>
    class aggregated
    {
       T * value
    public :
       T const * operator -> ( ) const { return value ; }
       T * operator -> ( ) { return value ; }
       ...
    } ;

Thus making "T * const" propagate to "T const * const".


This is quite nice. However it still leaves the problem of
inizialization, where the source is a const T*.
So const_cast would still be needed, is it?


Sorry, I don't know what problem you are referring to. Please
post a minimal example showing the problem. If you mean the op:

    int x = 3 ;
    const int * p = &x ;
    A a(p) ; // this is not const, but it still compiles!!!

I would be writing

    int x = 3 ;
    const int * p = &x ;
    aggregate<int const> a(p) ;

instead (since in that code I know at the point of instantiating
a that I'm instantiating it with T const *). Note that <T const>
applies to any smart pointer. The purpose of the aggregate class
above is to give the following behavior

    aggregate<int> a(p) ;
    *a = 5 ; // ok just as int *
    ...
    aggregate<int> const ac(a) ;
    *ac = 7 ; // compile error just as int const *

But hopefully you have some minimal realistic cleaned up example
of exactly the problem you are trying to solve. Anyhow, I do not
see a need for const_cast anywhere in the examples above.

KHD

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