Re: Frustrated in autocast failure

From:
"=?iso-8859-1?q?Daniel_Kr=FCgler?=" <daniel.kruegler@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Fri, 9 Mar 2007 04:20:40 CST
Message-ID:
<1173429353.040484.87000@30g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>
On 9 Mrz., 03:11, "Old Wolf" <oldw...@inspire.net.nz> wrote:

Here is some simpler code that demonstrates the problem:
  #include <iostream>
  #include <string>

  struct S
  {
    std::string z;
    operator std::string () const { return z; }
  // operator int *() const { return 0; }
  };

  int main()
  {
    S s;
    std::cout << s;
  }

The program fails to compile, unless the (int *) line is commented
back in. Perhaps someone more knowledgable than me can now comment
on what is going on.

It seems to me that S->(int *)->(void *) to match ostream::operator<<
(void *) is a trickier sequence than S->std::string to match
operator<<(ostream &, std::string const &) ! In fact the gcc
output shows that the latter function is not even in the candidates
list.


Your observed behaviour is expected: There exists the following
overload
candidates:

1) From <string> we have the function template

template<class charT, class traits, class Allocator>
basic_ostream<charT, traits>&
operator<<(basic_ostream<charT, traits>& os,
const basic_string<charT,traits,Allocator>& str);

According to my description given in my answer from
(Mon, 5 Mar 2007 15:55:26 CST) this candidate will be tried,
but since neither a cv-conversion nor a derived-base-relation
(see [temp.deduct.call]) is sufficient to come from the given S to
any
std::basic_string<> this step will fail.

2) Further-on there exists non-template candidates from
the basic_ostream<char> instance std::cout (free function
template candidates also, but they are also not matching),
from which

basic_ostream<char>& basic_ostream<char>::operator<<(const void* p);

is available via exactly one user-conversion and one standard-
conversion.
This conversion sequence is supposed to be tried, see 13.3.1/6,
13.3.3.1/3+4.

I hope this rather abbreviated explanation does not contain
too much fuzziness and incorrectness due to imprecise wording.

Greetings from Bremen,

Daniel Kr?gler

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