On 5/9/13 6:09 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Friday, May 10, 2013 07:35:36 Manu wrote:
I don't think this is entirely true, auto ref is a template concept, that
is, "automatic ref-ness", it selects the ref-ness of the argument
automatically, at compile time, just like auto applied everywhere else
(selects a type for instance, at compile time). This concept doesn't make
any sense applied to a non-template. It *IS* a ref as specified by the
programmer, there's nothing 'automatic' about it.
I don't buy this at all. The entire point of auto ref on parameters was to say
that you wanted to accept both rvalues and lvalues efficiently. The fact that
the template implementation happened to forward refness as a result was a
happy accident. auto ref is already described in TDPL, and it has nothing to
do with templates there. Using auto ref on non-templated functions would be
completely in line with what TDPL describes and would implement another
feature from TDPL that we're currently missing.
Exactly. I'll add that just saying "auto is a template concept" is
really devoid of information. It really is meaningless because "concept"
is so broad a word. One may as well say "class is an abstraction notion"
or any of a large variety of similar constructs.
Andrei
