On 12/5/10 12:04 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
I'm totally confused. I thought the point of auto ref was to pass by
value if it's an rvalue (since the data is already on the stack). If
this is not the case, then why not just make ref work that way? Why
wouldn't I mark all my functions as auto ref to avoid being pestered by
the compiler?
Because you sometimes do care about dealing with a true lvalue. Consider:
void bump(ref int x) {
++x;
}
Then:
unsigned int y;
bump(y); // you don't want this to go through
short z;
bump(z); // you don't want this to go through
int w;
bump(w * 2); // you don't want this to go through
Andrei
