On Dec 12, 2012, at 8:21 AM, Yakov Galka <ybungalobill@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Rob Stewart <robertstewart@comcast.net>wrote:
On Dec 12, 2012, at 2:38 AM, Yakov Galka <ybungalobill@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 11:47 PM, Rob Stewart <robertstewart@comcast.net wrote:
On Dec 10, 2012, at 7:55 AM, Sergey Cheban <s.cheban@drweb.com> wrote:
On 09.12.2012 17:13, Rob Stewart wrote:
>> - safe bool or explicit bool conversion operator > I don't think this is a good idea. Why not? This seems to be not intuitive and not so safe.
It is quite intuitive to me. true means non-null, and false means null.
Would it mean !empty() or !!begin()?
The former certainly. string_ref's are never assumed to be null terminated (which is why I provide data() and not c_str()), so the latter is not sensible.
I wrote !!begin(), not !!*begin(). In other works string_ref can *actually be a null pointer*, or at least I haven't seen anyone saying the contrary.
Of course. I misread your intent. You're assuming that the iterator type is a pointer. Besides, if string_ref holds a null pointer, I'd expect empty() to return true. Thus, the operator, and empty(), always mean a string with no characters.
The std::string has no such operator.
Why does that matter? It's still convenient. It would be a nice addition to std::string.
std::string does not have a 'null' state.
It's the state represented by empty().
I am not sure it is so certainly accepted by all.
It is the logical interpretation. It indicates whether the string is non-empty. I don't see any other generally useful interpretation, do you? ___ Rob