Jody Hagins wrote:
That is a very valid option as well. In fact, in his book, Sutter mentions that option specifically...
Exceptional C++, page 48:
"If you're one of those folks who like terse code, you can write the operator=() canonical form more compactly as:
Stack& operator=(Stack other) { Swap( other ); return *this; } "
Not being very up to date on optimization techniques, I do not know if a compiler can turn one into better code than the other.
Yes, it can. Consider the case where the definition of operator= is not visible to the compiler and one does s = Stack(); With the by-value version the temporary Stack() will be constructed directly in 'other', saving a copy. Of course in a future language with rvalue references the "Stack&& other" overload will be used instead, with similar or better performance. http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2004/n1690.html