Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Michel Fortin wrote:
On 2009-01-29 22:02:07 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> said:
Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
Will popFront and popBack return the element removed? Usually that
is the meaning of pop (but not always).
Great question. In STL they can't because C++ couldn't move values
reliably at the time (C++0X still can't IMHO but that's another
discussion). D would be able to because it has good support for
moving. I just don't want inefficiencies; returning e.g. a large
struct will still involve some memcpying even if costly resources are
not duplicated.
So I'm ambivalent about this.
That would seem like another good use for return type overloading:
void popFront();
ElementType popFront();
Too bad we can't have that.
I've been thinking for a while to suggest Walter to allow overloading of
void vs. anything else return type. Making one private or undefined
would prevent statically that people call functions and ignore error codes.
That's a really interesting idea. You could force ownership, too,
couldn't you? (So that you couldn't eg createFile("xxx") and forget to
store the file handle).
