Perry Smith wrote:
If this is not an appropriate list for this question, please let me know.
It is not, but I'm going to answer the question this once.
The books tell me to prefer const to #defines -- but where do you put them to have the right scope and not take up space in the object?
For in-class constants, you need to make them static, too.
What I'd like to have is:
class register { void set_mask() { reg |= mask; }
private: uint64_t reg; const uint64_t mask = 0x12345678; };
-> static const uint64_t mask = 0x12345678 Note that older compilers may not support this syntax.
But the compiler will not let me do this and even if it did,the mask would take up physical space. I don't want mask (or reg) to be visable outside of the class and I want the compiler to use mask as a compile time constant that does not consume space after the compile.
As long as you don't use mask in a context where it must take up space (such as taking its address), it won't. For future reference, a better place for straight C++ questions is Usenet's comp.lang.c++, or if you feel more comfortable with a browser interface, bulletin boards such as http://cboard.cprogramming.com/ . Sebastian Redl