Re: What's wrong with this picture?

From:
Peter Dimov <pdimov@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.std.c++
Date:
Sun, 6 Jan 2008 17:44:11 CST
Message-ID:
<7ea7227c-14e5-4ed9-b53a-e5015a2fc201@y5g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
On Jan 6, 9:52 am, lont...@gmail.com wrote:

Below is a copy of reference implementation from "Improved min/max"
proposal for upcoming C++0x standard library (http://www.open-std.org/
JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2007/n2199.html). Anyone else thinks that
something must be wrong with a language if this is how min/max has to
be implemented?


..

Indeed. Specifically, what's wrong with the language is that there is
no way to write a function that has a single return statement without
specifying its return type. min is simply

function min( x, y ) { return x < y? x: y; }

and while it's (or will be in C++0x) possible to somewhat approximate
the lack of explicit argument types:

template<class X, class Y> ... min( X && x, Y && y )
{
   return x < y? std::forward<X>( x ): std::forward<Y>( y );
}

the ... part is harder. It's possible that we'll be able to write min
this way:

template<class X, class Y> auto min( X && x, Y && y ) ->
  decltype( x < y? std::forward<X>( x ): std::forward<Y>( y ) )
{
   return x < y? std::forward<X>( x ): std::forward<Y>( y );
}

There's still something wrong with the language though. :-)

It will be funny if we end up with

auto min = <>( x, y ) { x < y? x: y }

as the easiest way to write min. :-)

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