Re: Explicitly specializing std::min() on VC++ 2005 Express Edition

From:

"Matthias Hofmann" <hofmann@anvil-soft.com>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.vc.language

Date:

Thu, 3 May 2007 14:02:44 +0200

Message-ID:

<59u1ceF2m5p0bU1@mid.individual.net>

"Tom Widmer [VC++ MVP]" <tom_usenet@hotmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:%23tlRhSWjHHA.4772@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...

You have your answer, but just to make things worse, what you are doing is
illegal anyway - you aren't allowed to specialize std function templates
unless the specialization involves a user-declared name (e.g. you can
specialize them for your own types, but not for built-in or standard
library types).

In practice, whether you care about this is up to you, but it is possible
a library might include its own explicit specializations or explicit
instantiations for such specializations, thus rendering your own explicit
specialization either undefined behaviour or a compiler error.

But what if I want to specialize a template function that I wrote myself? I
might have template function such as:

template <class T> inline
const T& minimum( const T& a, const T& b )
{ return a < b ? a : b; }

Then how do I specialize it in such a way that I can pass C-style strings? I
guess the answer is to overload the function instead of specializing it...
By the way, I found an interesting article on the topic of overloading vs.
specialization here: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/mill17.htm

--
Matthias Hofmann
Anvil-Soft, CEO
http://www.anvil-soft.com - The Creators of Toilet Tycoon
http://www.anvil-soft.de - Die Macher des Klomanagers