Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Kay-Uwe Kasemir <[email protected]> · Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:37:44 -0400

On Sep 27, 2005, at 13:04 , Andrew Johnson wrote:

Use 'assign' instead of 'operator =',
'isEqual' instead of 'operator ==',
'getElement' instead of 'operator []', ...
After replacing all operators, I think your suggestion is great.

I already implement assign() and equals(). The operator=

operator== and operator+= methods are non-virtual inline wrappers

that call those virtual functions, and are provided for user

convenience only.

I agree that it's initially more convenient to be able to
use the operators.
But in the long run, it causes the C++ and e.g. Java sources
differ, and in C++ I also find it difficult to understand what's
called when everything has cast and assignment operators.
Of course that's my personal problem and would never
happen to anybody else.

operator[] is not currently implemented in that fashion, but I am

willing to do that too (although I don't like your name so I will

probably change it).

Yes, feel free to change it. Some suggestions:

1) More explicitly named, with limited error handling
enum indexedElementAccessResultEnum

{ ok, index_too_large, string_temporarily_unavailable,

string_never_available };

class indexedElementAccessResult
{
public:
    indexedElementAccessResult ( indexedElementAccessResultEnum );
    virtual ~indexedElementAccessResult ();

 const indexedElementAccessResult & operator =

( indexedElementAccessResultEnum rhs );

    indexedElementAccessResultEnum getResult () const;
    bool isOK() const;
private:
    indexedElementAccessResult ();
    indexedElementAccessResultEnum result;
};

indexedElementAccessResult indexedElementAccess(size_t index, char

&result) const;

2) Naive, now with shorter names:
 // will return '\0' for invalid idx
 char get(size_t idx);

-Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System