On Behalf Of Fernando Cacciola Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 10:39 AM To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: [boost] Re: [optional] new assignmet semantic and references
So I think I will fix it unless users speak up... Though I will post this issue in the users list as well.
First I'd like to say that I love optional<>. When I first read about it I didn't think I'd use it much, but now I find myself using it all over the place. It's useful for so many things, but to me the most important is how it improves my ability to make code self-documenting. Personally, I like it the way it is. I've used optional quite a bit and it makes sense to me that operator= changes what an optional holds. I don't think it is a good idea to give operator= special semantics for references. I think it odd, for instance, that given the following optionals: int a = 5, b = 6; boost::optional<int&> ra = a, rb = b; this: ra = rb; would have different behavior than: ra.reset(); ra = rb; I can understand the desire to mimic the semantics of built in C++ references in boost::optional, but one uses boost::optional precisely in cases where one does not want those semantics - in cases where a reference may not be present, and where you may want to change which object is referred too. My humble .02. Brock