Re: operator overloading ==

From:
Ulrich Eckhardt <eckhardt@satorlaser.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Fri, 5 Mar 2010 04:58:46 CST
Message-ID:
<c0s667-ed3.ln1@satorlaser.homedns.org>
A wrote:

I am writing a "vector" class. I know about the STL but I prefer to
use this as I use this to create a "matrix" class later. I read that
using the inbuilt STL to create a matrix is not the best way to do it.


Ahem, no? I mean such a general statement is not generally true. How and if
you can use std::vector depends on how your matrix class eventually looks
like. What I can say is that generally the standard-supplied classes are of
better quality than those you roll yourself.

template <class T>
class vec {
private:
         int length;
         T *v;
public:
         vec();
         explicit vec(int n);
         vec(const T &a, int n);
         vec(const T *a, int n);
         vec(const vec &cpy);
         vec & operator=(const vec &equate);
         vec & operator=(const T &a);
         inline T & operator[](const int i);
         inline const T & operator[](const int i) const;
         inline int size() const;
         ~vec();
};


First thing I see which strikes me as wrong is the use of 'int' for the
length, as opposed to size_t. Further, there are no iterators, no reserve
memberfunction or generally functions to change the size or insert/delete
elements. Using this is IMHO not a better replacement for std::vector.

Now, I want to overload the operator == [...]

member function:
vec<bool> operator==(const T &a) const;

[...]

This works great, but I would like to return the reference instead of
the whole vector and would like to know how to do it. I am unable to
make use of the "this" pointer as I am returning a "local vector".


Why do you want that? If you think about speed, profile that first and then
apply MOJO[1] if necessary. Otherwise, you can't. What you could do is to
pass in a reference to the output vector, but then you can't use
operator==, that only works in a function.

         if(v[i] == a) {
             tmp[i] = true;
         }


This boils down to

   if(/boolean expression/ == true)
       tmp[i] = true;

The else branch is not present, but you have the initialisation of 'tmp'
with 'false' earlier on. Safe yourself that trouble and simply do:

   tmp[i] = v[i]==a;

Uli

[1] Search the web for "C++ MOJO".

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