Re: Trick for many identical arguments

From:
=?ISO-8859-15?Q?Daniel_Kr=FCgler?= <daniel.kruegler@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Sat, 3 Mar 2012 01:08:10 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<jirfp4$bvu$1@dont-email.me>
Am 02.03.2012 21:59, schrieb Thomas Richter:

Dear experts,

is there a nice (template ?) trick to generate functions with variable
number of arguments without using varargs (and hence, no type-checks)?
The use case would be to generate functions for

class Argument;

class Caller {
void Launch(Argument arg1);
void Launch(Argument arg1,Argument arg2);
void Launch(Argument arg1,Argument arg2,Argument arg3);
// and so on
};

without the code repetition as in the above case. Arguments are all
identical in type, but their number may grow very large and I don't want
to repeat the same type of code all over again.


For a C++11 compiler variadic templates seem to be a natural solution:

class Argument;

class Caller {
  template<class... Arg>
  void Launch(Arg... arg);
};

It is possible to realize that only particular types are valid arguments
for such function template or a maximum/minimum number of arguments.
Consider:

#include <type_traits>

template<class...>
struct and_;

template<>
struct and_<> : std::true_type
{
};

template<class P>
struct and_<P> : P
{
};

template<class P1, class P2>
struct and_<P1, P2> : std::conditional<P1::value, P2, P1>::type
{
};

template<class P1, class P2, class P3, class... Pn>
struct and_<P1, P2, P3, Pn...> : std::conditional<P1::value, and_<P2,
P3, Pn...>, P1>::type
{
};

class Argument{};

struct Caller {
  template<class... Arg, class =
    typename std::enable_if<
      and_<std::is_convertible<Arg, Argument>...,
std::integral_constant<bool, (sizeof...(Arg) > 0)>>::value
    >::type
  >
  void Launch(Arg... arg){}
};

int main() {
  Argument arg1, arg2;
  Caller c;
  c.Launch(arg1); // OK
  c.Launch(arg1, arg2); // OK
  c.Launch(); // Error
}

An alternative approach but also requiring a C++11 compiler would be to
use a single function taking an initializer_list:

#include <initializer_list>

class Argument{};

struct Caller {
  void Launch(std::initializer_list<Argument> arg){}
};

int main() {
  Argument arg1, arg2;
  Caller c;
  c.Launch({arg1}); // OK
  c.Launch({arg1, arg2}); // OK
}

The disadvantage of this approach is, that you are *required* to provide
the argument list in braces.

HTH & Greetings from Bremen,

Daniel Kr?gler

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