On Tue, 2013-07-30 at 11:30 +0200, Martin Jambor wrote: > Hi, > > On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 09:02:53PM +0200, Oleg Endo wrote: > > On Mon, 2013-07-29 at 14:20 -0400, David Malcolm wrote: > > > > > > > > The same here and at a few other places. It may be just me not being > > > > used to references... nevertheless, if someone really wants to use > > > > them like this, at least make them const and you will save a night of > > > > frantic debugging to someone, probably to yourself. But I strongly > > > > prefer pointers... it's hard to describe how strongly I prefer them. > > > > > > OK. How do others feel? As I said above, I like the above idiom, > > > since it puts the assertion of non-NULLness in a single place. > > > > I'm voting for references. References can be seen as yet another > > software structuring tool that instantly communicate some properties > > such as you mentioned above. In addition to that it's also a hint of > > ownership, i.e. if I get an object& from somewhere I know that I better > > not even think about whether to delete it or not. > > > > well, let me stress again that we should think about this in the > context of GCC. In GCC, we are used to C semantics of the dot > operator
How are the dot operator semantics in C different from the dot operator semantics in C++? > and have a lot of existing code that we will continue to use > and mix with new code with the same assumption. Putting a reference > where none has been before might result in silent and hard to spot > erroneous modifications. Sorry, I have difficulty understanding your reasoning here. Could you provide an example for "Putting a reference where none has been before might result in silent and hard to spot erroneous modifications."? Cheers, Oleg