On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:12:21 +0300, "Peter Dimov" <pdimov@mmltd.net> wrote:
Gennaro Prota wrote:
Sure that's easy for monodimensional arrays. When you write something like, for instance,
COUNT_OF_N(3, x)
Out of curiosity, have you ever needed this?
Shall I be sincere? No, I've never needed this :) But I generally invent a solution... then someone else comes out with the problem for it! Seriously, I feel it would be a bit inelegant on our part to just provide for the monodimensional case. Just my groundless impression perhaps...
I use the one-dimensional function all the time, but I've never, ever, needed to obtain "the 3rd size".
In all honesty, I think I've never really used statically sized arrays with more than 3 dimensions either (by the way, they tend to immediately grow out of stack possibilities; something like int x[3][4][5][6][7][8] would already take (8!)/(2!)*sizeof(int) bytes, thus typically 78.75 KiB, and the single dimension counts here are very low compared to what one could imagine for a "real life" application)
By the way, Microsoft seems to be pushing _countof( x ) as a name for this functionality, probably with the intention to make it countof if it gets in an official C or C++ document one day. I've always used array_size or just size, but countof isn't bad.
I've always chosen a name containing "count" rather than "size" because "size" implies or may imply "number of bytes", instead of "number of elements". _countof is nice but should be generalized, IMHO, even if multidimensional static arrays are rare. And I'd like for it to also work with tr1::array. --Gennaro.