Re: template functions intricacies

From:
=?iso-8859-1?q?Daniel_Kr=FCgler?= <daniel.kruegler@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.std.c++
Date:
Sun, 1 Jul 2007 21:59:45 CST
Message-ID:
<1183305096.421389.198610@n2g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
On 27 Jun., 00:40, "mikel...@gmail.com" <mikel...@gmail.com> wrote:
[..]

if I change line /*1*/ making the template function call explicit
  g<M,N>((*this).v,c.v);
everything works fine. so
1) I can't understand this behaviour


The problem is, that the compiler cannot deduce the template
arguments T and U from a call to g without explicit specification
of the template argument types in this case.
The reason is, that in C++ you can simply specialize every template
in a more or less arbitrary manner. Someone could simply specialize
foo in the following way:

template <>
class foo<int> {
public:
  class val { public: double p; }; // Note: double, *not* int!
  // .. remaining parts
};

or more worse, the specialization might not have *any* inner class
val at all:

template <>
class foo<float> {};

For this reason can a compiler never deduce from a template
typedef back to the template parameter. A possible workaround
would be to write g as follows:

template <class T, class U>
void g(T& a, U& b)
{ std::cout << a.p<<","<<b.p<<"\n"; }

This might be unsatisfactory for you, because T and U are
unconstrained, but the point is, that the same applies for
foo<T>::val compared to foo<U>::val for every T different
from U.

A cleaner solution would be to separate the inner class
from the outer one:

template <class M>
class val { public: M p; };

template <class M>
class foo {
public:
  val<M> v;
  template <class N> void h(foo<N>& c);
};

template <class T, class U>
void g(val<T>& a, val<U>& b)
{ std::cout << a.p<<","<<b.p<<"\n"; }

Now the compiler can deduce T and U from the
following (unchanged) call to g.

Greetings from Bremen,

Daniel Kr?gler

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