Re: Using boost::lambda with std::count_if

From:
Vladimir Marko <swelef@post.sk>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:45:31 CST
Message-ID:
<b58c0547-5e83-47e6-98db-09feb0a73ec3@e10g2000prf.googlegroups.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
X-Original-Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:29:52 -0800 (PST)
X-Submission-Address: c++-submit@netlab.cs.rpi.edu

francis_r wrote:

class User
{
public:
    enum Status
    {
        Online,
        Away
        Offline
    };

    Status status() const;
[...]
};

And I have a vector:
std::vector<User> users;

Now I want to use count_if to count all users that have not the
Offline status. I can do this by writing a predicate function of
course but I think it would be nice to do this using a lambda
expression.

I can't figure out how to write the expression. Idealy it would look
something like this I think:
count_if(users.begin(), users.end(), lambda::_1.status() !=
User::Offline);
But that doesn't compile, as I expected.


The seemingly closest to "_1.status" would be
  boost::lambda::_1->*&User::status
but the semantics of this expression is a bit odd, see
  http://boost.org/doc/html/lambda/le_in_details.html#lambda.member_pointer_operator
Thus, you should use
  boost::lambda::bind(&User::status,boost::lambda::_1)!=User::Offline
as the predicate.

Another question: suppose I do write following predicate functions:

[...]
bool Predicate_UserOffline(const User& user)
{ return user.status() == User::Offline; }

Is it then possible to count the users, using count_if, that are
either Online or Away? It would be !Predicate_UserOffline, but I can't
use that expression as a function pointer. I could use count_if two
times, once with Predicate_UserOnline and once with
Predicate_UserAway, and then the sum would be correct too. But I
wonder if it would be possible to use only one count_if statement.


Well, you could use
  boost::lambda::bind(Predicate_UserOffline,boost::lambda::_1)!
=User::Offline
as a predicate but that's just an unnecessary indirection
compared to the predicate above.

Boost.Lambda lets you combine arbitrarily complex
expressions, you just need to be a bit careful. When
the C++ rules don't let you do something the intuitive
way, you can usually get around the problem with
boost::lambda::bind.

Cheers,
Vladimir

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