Re: Does C++ support type deduction from inner class of a template?

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Daniel_Kr=FCgler?= <daniel.kruegler@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:10:59 CST
Message-ID:
<45db1b2f-76bf-4c31-a478-9425ee5757df@q21g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>
On 19 Feb., 02:27, Jesse Perla <jessepe...@gmail.com> wrote:

I can't get the compiler to deduce the type in a template function
when being passed an inner class. Any ideas? If I remove the
template from the class, everything works fine...

Here is a minimalist example (in reality I am actually trying to
overload << for streams).

template<std::size_t N>
class simplex
{
public:
        class simplex_results{
        };

        simplex_results res() const{return res_;}
protected:
        simplex_results res_;

};

template<std::size_t N>
void f (const typename simplex<N>::simplex_results& res)
{
};

int main()
{
        simplex<2> opt;
        simplex<2>::simplex_results res = opt.res();
        f<2>(res); //works
// f(res); //Fails to compile
}


It is not possible (in general) to deduce any template
parameter from a template based on some member
type. There are at least two reasons for that:

1) Consider a template like the following one

template <std::size_t N>
struct simplex {
   typedef int simplex_results;
};

deduced in

template<std::size_t N>
void f (const typename simplex<N>::simplex_results&);

int main() {
   simplex<42>::simplex_results sr = 0;
   f(sr);
}

The compiler is able to see that you provided an int
to f, but how should the compiler deduce from
this information the value N == 42?

2) Templates allow specializations. Consider your
original example simplified:

template<std::size_t N>
class simplex
{
public:
         class simplex_results{};
};

template<>
class simplex<13>
{
public:
         typedef simplex<2>::simplex_results simplex_results;
};

template<>
class simplex<5>
{
public:
         typedef bool simplex_results;
};

These example should clearly demonstrate that
no strict correlation starting from

template<Args>::some_name

and searching *to*

Args

exists (only vice versa).

HTH & Greetings from Bremen,

Daniel Kr?gler

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