Re: Class hierarchy generated from a template

From:
"Greg Herlihy" <greghe@pacbell.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
30 Apr 2006 13:43:31 -0400
Message-ID:
<1146417257.979950.186930@j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Dimitar wrote:

What is wrong with the following:

template<size_t size> class X;

template<>
class X<0> {};

template<>
class X<1>
{
public:
  void M(const char (&x)[1]) {}
};

template<size_t size>
class X : public X<size - 1>
{
public:
  void M(const char (&x)[size]) {}
};

Sample use would be:

char arr[3] = "ab";
X<4> x;
x.M(arr);

However this does not compile with MS VC7. If arr has size 4 then it
compiles.

Am I trying to do something that is not possible - for example the line
"class X : public X<size - 1>"? If this is not valid I would expect
that it should not compile at all then (have not had chance to test
with gcc) or at least give some warning.

And No, I can not use vector, or string, or anything more inteligent
than C-array (there are reasons why, but they are not related to the
question in this post)


I revised the code so that it compiles as expected. Note in addition to
the "using" directive, I replaced the size_t non-type template
parameter with an "int". Otherwise, it would be necessary to append a
"u" to each integral constant value used to instantiate the class
template - a requirement which is both non-obvious and almost certainly
completely unnecessary since the template cannot be instantiated with a
negative value anyway.

     template<int size> class X;

     template<>
     class X<0> {};

     template<>
     class X<1>
     {
     public:
         void M(const char (&x)[1]) const
         {
         }
     };

     template<int size>
     class X : public X<size-1>
     {
     public:
         using X<size-1>::M;

         void M(const char (&x)[size]) const
         {
         }
     };

     int main()
     {
         const char arr[3] = "ab";
         X<10> x;

         x.M(arr);
     }

Greg

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