On 5 December 2012 11:02, Nathan Ridge wrote:

The commented line compiles fine for me with GCC >= 4.4 and clang 3.2

Try call the result:

//bind(b, bind(a))(); // can't call bind(b, cref(bind(a)))(); // works

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Nathan Crookston wrote:

...

...

//bind(b, bind(a));//*1 bind(b, cref(bind(a)));//*2

In short, *1 is evaluating a()

Thank you. This surprises me as I thought boost::bind returned an object of type boost::function. I need to understand this better and am about to go read more on this.

The exact return type of boost::bind is unspecified. It's guaranteed to be a function object that is callable with certain arguments, so in that sense you can think of the return type as being *like* a boost::function, but it doesn't have to actually be boost::function (and in practice it won't be, because boost::function's ability to wrap any callable object incurs a performance overhead, which is not necessary for bind).

...

It would be more idiomatic to use protect:

bind(b, boost::protect(bind(a)))

I made the change, thank you. Hopefully when I understand better what boost::bind is doing (i.e. not returning a boost::function) it will be obvious why I need boost::protect. My guess is that boost::protect converts whatever boost::bind does return into a boost::function.

boost::protect itself just wraps the function object returned by bind() into another function object, which is callable in the same way, but is marked as being "protected". This marking is only meaningful when the function object is used as an argument to another bind expression. The outer bind expression recognizes the marking, and does a different thing based on whether it's there or not:   - If the marking is there, it treats the argument like any other     function object (in your case, this is the behaviour you desire).   - If the marking is not there, it composes the two function objects     (see [1] for details). This is an extra feature of boost::bind that     allows you to accomplish something that you couldn't otherwise.     protect() is provided as a means to disable this feature in cases     when you just want the regular behaviour (as in your case). Hope that clears things up a bit. Regards, Nate [1] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_52_0/libs/bind/bind.html#nested_binds