C++ Template Corner Cases

各位读者，很抱歉这篇文章是英文的，我当初做笔记的时候，写成英文了，这样才可以在同事之间交流。而现在确实没时间翻译过来了，还望大家理解，谢谢！

Following are some corner cases of C++ template features. A lot of the text is simply extracted from "C++ Templates: The Complete Guide", with some of my personal understanding. These features are trivial and easily neglected, but you should have some impression to them in case you run into troubles caused by the neglect.

I made my notes in English, and I don't bother to translate them into Chinese, forgive my laziness. :)



0. use "typename" to extract type defined within a type parameter, like this: typename T::iterator itr; otherwise the 'itr' is treated as a data member of T.

1. zero initialization
When using a var x of type T, we MUST initialize it like this: T x = T(); so that when T is a primitive type, x can also be initialized with 0, or NULL (when T is a pointer type). Of course we must make sure
when T is a class type, it has a default constructor. Simply using T x; can't initialize x when T is a primitive type.

2. .template

The .template Construct
A very similar problem was discovered after the introduction of typename. Consider the following example using the standard bitset type:

template<int N>
void printBitset (std::bitset<N> const& bs)
{
    std::cout << bs.template to_string<char,char_traits<char>,
                                       allocator<char> >();
}
The strange construct in this example is .template. Without that extra use of template, the compiler does not know that the less-than token (<) that follows is not really "less than" but the beginning of a template argument list. Note that this is a problem only if the construct before the period depends on a template parameter. In our example, the parameter bs depends on the template parameter N.

3. char star string type at reference type parameter
Suppose we have a string str: char str[32]; The type of 'str' symbol is "a char string" and "of 32 chars long". similarly the literal "abc" 's type is: " a char string" and "of 3 chars long",
that is, the "type" information consists of both "base type", which is "char", and "length", which is 32 here. So
such a string is of different type to a char* pointer, such as char*p; , a type conversion is done if passing a string literal as argument to a function with char* formal parameter.

template <typename T>
inline T const& max (T const& a, T const& b)
{
    return a < b ? b : a;
}

So when we use max("abc", "def") to call above function, it is OK. but if we use max("abc", "defg") to call it, it is wrong, because "abc" and "defg" are of different types --- the length is different. And automatical type conversion is not done for reference types here.

This means that the above array 'str', and string literals like "abc", is not of the same type as "char *pstr;", as most people may believe. Actually it takes a conversion to convert 'str' array or the string literals to a 'char*' type. However, during template argument deduction array-to-pointer conversion (often called decay) occurs only if the parameter does not have a reference type. Thus we have the above issue. And if we don't use reference in above code, like this:
template <typename T>
inline T max (T a, T b)
{
    return a < b ? b : a;
}

Both max("abc", "def") and max("abc", "defg") can build OK, since a automatic conversion from string literal to char* is done, so finally we have the same type 'char*' as T.

4. template template types
After reading the whole lot of text in the book, I realized that this is really a very particular feature, too complicated and restricted to use widely.
Though, since it is a very recently added new C++ template feature, it can be used in your configure script to test whether your compiler conforms to
C++ language standard. The piece of code in the book can directly be used in your m4 file for configure to use.