how do you write proxies for rvalues?

From:
Gene Bushuyev <publicfilter@gbresearch.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:56:54 CST
Message-ID:
<0b6ea7d6-69e2-43cf-b967-f51c19098ce5@z28g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>
As an exercise to familiarize myself with rvalues I decided to write a
proxy class for plus operator. It turned out to be more difficult than
I thought.
Here is what I got (tell me if I did it wrong):

    template<class T1, class T2>
    class PlusProxy
    {
        T1 t1;
        T2 t2;
    public:
        PlusProxy(T1&& t1, T2&& t2)
            : t1(std::forward<T1>(t1)),
            t2(std::forward<T1>(t2))
        {}

        PlusProxy(PlusProxy&& other)
            : t1(std::forward<T1>(other.t1)),
            t2(std::forward<T1>(other.t2))
        {}

        PlusProxy&& operator = (PlusProxy&& other)
        {
            swap(std::forward<T1>(*this), other);
        }

        friend
        void swap(PlusProxy<T1,T2>&& p1, PlusProxy<T1,T2>&& p2)
        {
            swap(std::forward<T1>(p1.t1), std::forward<T1>(p2.t1));
            swap(std::forward<T1>(p1.t2), std::forward<T1>(p2.t2));
        }

        decltype(typename std::remove_reference<T1>::type() +
            typename std::remove_reference<T2>::type())
        operator ()() const { return t1 + t2; }

        //decltype(typename std::remove_reference<T1>::type()[0] +
        // typename std::remove_reference<T2>::type()[0])
        //operator [](std::size_t i) const { return t1[i] + t2[i]; }

    };

    template<class T1, class T2>
    PlusProxy<T1, T2> MakePlus (T1&& t1, T2&& t2)
    {
        return PlusProxy<T1,T2>(std::forward<T1>(t1),
            std::forward<T2>(t2));
    }

    int main()
    {
        int a = 1, b = 2;
        std::cout << "int 1: " << MakePlus(a, b)() << std::endl;
        std::cout << "int 2: " << MakePlus(a, 1)() << std::endl;
        std::cout << "int 3: " << MakePlus(5, 2)() << std::endl;

        std::string s1("-string1-");
        std::string s2("-string2-");
        std::cout << "str 1: " << MakePlus(s1, s2)() << std::endl;
        std::cout << "str 2: "
            << MakePlus(s1, std::string("hello"))() << std::endl;
        //std::cout << "str 3: "
        // << MakePlus(s1, "world")() << std::endl;
        //std::cout << "str 4: "
        // << MakePlus("hello", "world")() << std::endl;
    }

I compiled this example with VC2010 and gcc 4.5 and got the same
results.
The first problem I encountered was with operator[] in this example.
It turns out if I try to instantiate PlusProxy on int type, compiler
would complain about decltype(...) for operator[]. Why? There is no
instantiation of operator[], why doesn't compiler defer this check to
the point of instantiation as it would be the case if I used return
type without decltype.

The second problem was with instantiation on string types. The
expression MakePlus(s1, "world") wouldn't compile because
remove_reference did something to the string literal in decltype
expression, so I'm getting this error:
conversion from 'int' to non-scalar type 'const char [6]' requested.
Is there anything I can do to handle both string and non-string
literals in the same way?

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