Jeffrey Lee Hellrung, Jr. wrote:
Stated differently, I would think that the existence of an operator< comparing objects of different types implies (more often than not) an ordering between objects of those types. And if a user implicitly requests the use of this operator< through a call to clamp, I don't see why the interface should prohibit that.
I'm quite happy with the behavior of std::max to only accept arguments of the same type, because it prevents bugs like the following: for (std::size_t i = v.size()-1; i > -1; --i) { ... } This bug also provides a counterexample to your statement that the existence of an operator< accepting the arguments is enough for assuming that it does the right thing. IMO, there are very good reasons why std::max is defined the way it is, and clamp should better follow the precedence of std::max instead of exhibiting unexpected behavior. Regards, Thomas