Re: How to return a reference, when I really need it

From:
Jonathan Lee <chorus@shaw.ca>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:25:04 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<96ee29f7-3beb-4298-8527-05e134aba7b6@t13g2000yqt.googlegroups.com>
On Jul 31, 8:27 am, BlackLight <blackligh...@gmail.com> wrote:

A little out of order... addressing your actual question first:

or something like that, and this is not possible returning the Vector
object as a value. But if I declare a local Vector object and I return
its reference, I've got a problem as returning the reference of a
local variable. Has any of you a solution for this?


1) Use RVO. See the Parashift C++ faq, item 10.9.
2) Binding the automatic to a const reference will extend its lifetime
   ex.,

      const Vector& t = somematrix[3];

   But it _has_ to be a const reference so you're limited with what
   you can do with it.

Some other comments:

Vector Matrix::operator[] (size_t i) throw() {
        if (i >= rows)
                throw InvalidMatrixIndexException();


Why do you have throw() when you actually throw? (rhetorical, don't
really need to answer..)

(fundamentally a wrapping around vector<float> I wrote for doing
cool mathematical tricks, like sums, scalar products, norms
etc.).


I'd inherit from std::valarray instead and you'll get some of this
stuff for free.

Matrix A;
A[0][0] = 1.0;


You could save your data as a std::vector of std::vector (or
valarray, as I mentioned) rows. Then just return the reference
to the row. You'd get this (particular) notation for free.

Ex.,

std::vector< std::vector<float> > matrix_data;
typedef std::vector< std::vector<float> >::reference ref

ref Matrix::operator[](size_t i) {
  return matrix_data.at(i);
}

--Jonathan

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