On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:58:02 -0500, Jérôme M. Berger <[email protected]>
wrote:
Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:53:59 -0500, Jesse Phillips
<[email protected]> wrote:
Answering a question over on stack overflow I realized that clear()
has 2 meanings.
TDPL says that clear should be used to free resources of the object
and place the object into an invalid state. That is failure can occur
but memory corruption is prevent, similar to null for pointer types.
However for container types clear() is used to empty the container. It
is still valid to use the container after calling clear(), but the
definition from TDPL suggest that this can not be expected.
clear as a global function is for destroying a class/struct
clear as a member can do anything. clear is not a keyword.
clear(container) -> same as delete container, but without freeing any
memory.
container.clear() -> remove all elements
This has been brought up before as a problem, I'm not sure it's that
terrible, but I can see why there might be confusion.
Uniform function call syntax?
I don't expect this to be a huge problem. Will people who more likely
destroy an object with:
clear(obj);
or
obj.clear();
? To me, the first looks like you are doing an operation to the object,
where the second looks like you are having the object do an operation.
UFC is going to cause lots of these little corner cases. Another I can
think of is global properties. with @property foo(int x), do you call
this as foo = 1; or 1.foo?
-Steve
