Re: arrays decaying to pointers

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Daniel_Kr=FCgler?= <daniel.kruegler@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Mon, 30 May 2011 16:17:40 CST
Message-ID:
<is02a1$m86$1@dont-email.me>
On 2011-05-30 14:56, Marc wrote:

Hello,

arrays decay to pointers, which allows for:

template<class Iter>
void f(Iter first, Iter theend);

int tab[]={1,2,3};
f(tab,tab+3);

and Iter is deduced as int*.

However, if I go through a forwarding function:
template<class A,class B>
void g(A const&a, B const&b){ f(a,b); }
g(tab,tab+3);

f now receives a reference to an array of _const_ int and a reference
to a const pointer to int. But just passing f a pointer to const
int and a pointer to int is already an error as the compiler can't
deduce Iter anymore (yes, one could dream about a compiler clever
enough to deduce Iter as const int* in this case).

So it looks like my best bet is to define f with 2 different template
parameters:
template<class Iter1,class Iter2>
void f(Iter1 first, Iter2 theend);

and possibly add various checks to make sure Iter1 and Iter2 are
compatible. Is there some better way?


I would stay away from adding several overloads. Instead I would follow the spirit of make_tuple as described in TR1 (modulo reference_wrapper unwrapping but plus decaying): The function template takes arguments by const& Ti, but would convert them to std::decay<Ti>::type. This requires that you can create a helper function like

template <class T>
typename decay<T>::type decay_copy(const T& v)
{ return v; }

with C++03 means. IMO this should not be too hard to realize (Implementing the decay trait should be possible with C++03 means). The advantage over using begin/end is that this decay-forwarder can be used for other decayable types. The final call syntax would then be:

void g(A const&a, B const&b){ f(decay_copy(a), decay_copy(b)); }

HTH & Greetings from Bremen,

Daniel Kr?gler

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