Re: template argument deduction oddity?

From:
"=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Daniel_Kr=FCgler?=" <daniel.kruegler@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:57:13 CST
Message-ID:
<23e51db2-7dee-4b4d-bede-855ee4c0d0c5@s12g2000prg.googlegroups.com>
On 19 Dez., 21:13, news.nospam.cech...@gmail.com wrote:

This is not a big complicated generic thing, but the compiler is
having some trouble.

   template <class D>
   struct GenericThing
   {
      struct T { };
   };

   struct Stream
   { };

   template <class D>
   Stream& operator<< (
      Stream& out,
      typename GenericThing<D>::T const & thing)
   {
      return out;
   }


Indeed, the compiler cannot resolve D in this
situation (which is a so-called nondeduced
context). The reason for this is, because C++
templates are a priori unconstrained and the
compiler cannot not safely guarantee that it
can deduce D here. Consider the following
specializations for GenericThing:

template <>
struct GenericThing<int>{}; // Ooops, no T

or this one

template <typename T>
struct GenericThing<T*> {
  int T; // Oops, T is not a type
};

So what rule of C++ is preventing this deduction? I presume it has
something to do with the argument type being *inside* the template
class as opposed to *being* the templated type.


Have a look at [temp.deduct.type]/5+6 in the recent
draft N2461 or [temp.deduct.type]/4 in the official
standard 14882-2003, which explains the concept of
non-deduced context during template argument deduction.

And how would one get around this problem?


That depends. The most simple workaround
given your snippet is simply to write:

template <class D>
   Stream& operator<< (
      Stream& out,
      D const & thing)
   {
      return out;
   }

You need to provide more details of what you
want to realize to give you better advice.

HTH & Greetings from Bremen,

Daniel Kr?gler

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