On 10 November 2011 10:58, Basile Starynkevitch wrote: > With the type inference abilities given by > the auto keyword, it is sometimes hard for a beginner to understand what type > is some > particular expression in his code (or what exactly function is called in an > overloaded > context).
If 'auto' obfuscates the code don't use it, and if overloaded functions don't do the same thing for different argument types then they should be renamed. If I call advance(iter, 4) I don't want to know that it called the specialization of std::advance<std::vector<X>::iterator> because all I care is that it calls the appropriate specialization, which it will automatically. Eventually I'm going to come back to this idea, but I want that for debugging template libraries, not for interactive use in an IDE: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-06/msg00110.html > The type annotation file can be generated by C++ front-end, and would contain > type and position information for every expression inside a source file. > > That type annotation produced by g++ would be usable by external editors, etc. That's a pretty big assumption, and the file would be useless without editor support (I realise there's a chicken and egg situation here.) Doesn't DWARF debug info already contain all that info anyway? > Of course, such a thing could be done by some GCC plugin, but I believe > providing the > feature inside GCC itself, and documenting the format of the textual type > annotation > file, would give this feature more visibility, and it would help people a > lot. And I am > pretty certain that the C++ frontend does compute the type of each > expression, so it is > mostly the point of defining a textual type annotation format and output it. What's the point of plugins if they aren't used to do this sort of thing?
