"Douglas Gregor" <gregod@cs.rpi.edu> wrote in message news:<200405061958.52886.gregod@cs.rpi.edu>...
On Thursday 06 May 2004 05:32 pm, Dill, John wrote:
I believe that this can be done, but doesn't justify whether it should be done. There are several issues that I see at the moment.
A. Changes the semantics of everyone's bind and mem_fn, no biggy there ;-). B. Pass by value is silent, not sure how many copies of the argument will be generated if pass-by-value.
But at the same time there is an advantage.
a. You can use literals in calling your bind functions.
What do you all think?
I don't like the change.
Ideally, bind(f, _1, _2, _3)(x, y, z) would be exactly equivalent to f(x, y, z). The current bind() implementation gives us nearly this equivalence because it passes by reference, except that we get a failure at compile time if one tries to pass a literal. Going to passing by value would take us further from that ideal equivalence.
I see your point. But, what if instead of argument_traits being pass by value, it by default passes by T const&? What could be done is to have the bind_t arguments be passed by const reference, and then use reference_wrapper to do type-selection to pass by reference. It still supports literals, and passes by T const& when it can, but everything that is passed by reference must have a ref( object ). The compiler would fail if you try to pass a reference without a reference_wrapper because it by default tries to pass a T const&. This wouldn't require the 2^N overloads but would require you to do a ref( object ) for everything passed by reference. This might also be a workaround for those compilers that don't support T& and T const& overloading. I think that this should be addressed, either through overloading, or maybe this idea might be feasible. I think the implementation of this aspect of bind is worth doing. Best, John