Re: how to avoid instantiation of template operator?

From:
"=?iso-8859-1?q?Daniel_Kr=FCgler?=" <daniel.kruegler@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:38:37 CST
Message-ID:
<1174842035.225684.45120@l75g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
Michael Kilburn schrieb:

Basically, this operator==:

template<class T> class accessor {
     typedef accessor<T> Self;
public:
     template<class C> friend inline bool operator==(Self l, C& r)
{ return l.m_ref == r; }
};

should not be instantiated if 'l.m_ref == r' fails to compile due to,
for example, absence of related operator==.


Unfortunately your snippet misses some clarifications,
the obvious one is that it is not clear, what type m_ref
belongs to, because its not defined above. In the following
I assume that m_ref has type T.
The code should solve your problem, I guess. It works for
Comeau 4.3.8 ALPHA, VS2003, VS2005-SP1, and mingw
with gcc 3.4.

template <bool Enable, typename T = void>
struct enable_if {
  typedef T type;
};

template <typename T>
struct enable_if<false, T> {
};

namespace Details {

struct Shim
{
  Shim(...); // Can be implicitely constructed by
             // everything (Not defined).
};

struct NoMatchType
{
};

// Only declared, never defined:
NoMatchType operator==(const Shim&, const Shim&);

template <typename T, typename U>
struct IsEqualComparableImpl
{
private:
    static const T& t();
    static const U& u();
    static char Check(bool); // Expected result
    static char (&Check(const NoMatchType&))[2]; // Fallback
public:
    static const bool value = sizeof(Check(t() == u())) == 1;
};

}

template <typename T, typename U>
struct IsEqualComparable {
  static const bool value =
    Details::IsEqualComparableImpl<T, U>::value;
};

template<class T> class accessor {
   typedef accessor<T> Self;
public:
   accessor() : m_ref() {}

   template<class C> friend
   inline
   typename enable_if<IsEqualComparable<T, C>::value,
    bool>::type
   operator==(Self l, C& r) {
     return l.m_ref == r;
   }
private:
  T m_ref;
};

class C{};

class D {};
bool operator==(D, D) { return true; }

bool test() {
  accessor<D> a1;
  D d;
  bool b = a1 == d; // OK
  accessor<int> a;
  C c;
  return a == c; // Error
}

int main() {
  return test();
}

Greetings from Bremen,

Daniel Kr|gler

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