Re: Template notation

From:

=?iso-8859-1?q?Erik_Wikstr=F6m?= <eriwik@student.chalmers.se>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

23 Apr 2007 05:42:24 -0700

Message-ID:

<1177332144.715029.115030@p77g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>

On 23 Apr, 14:30, desktop <f...@sss.com> wrote:

I am trying to understand the following template:

template <typename T>
inline T const& max (T const& a, T const& b) {
return a < b ? b : a;

}

does it say that the function max returns a constant reference to T of
any type?

It returns a const reference of type T, yes.

I have never seen a function returning references before, does it mean
that it returns the address of the value returned?

No, pointers are not references, a reference can be seen as an alias
for a variable, so the following is true for references but not for
pointers:

int i = 1;
int& j = i; // j is a reference to i
if (&i == &j)
// Always true

So you can see that if you take the address of a reference to an
object you get the address of the object while if you take the address
of a pointer to a object you get that pointer's address.

Another example:

void foo(int& i) {
++i;
}

int k = 1;

foo(k);

Now, in the function foo(), the i we are changing is the same integer
as k, so it's another name but the same variable.

--
Erik Wikstr=F6m