cplusplus.co.il

Generic programming is very common and has different names (and features) in various programming languages; C++ provides Turing-Complete Templates, Java offers Generics (along with Ada, Eiffel, C#, and Visual Basic .Net), and Parametric Polymorphism is present in ML, Scala, and Haskell.

While I am generally pretty happy with what C++ has to offer, adopting some of the features offered by other mechanisms can come in handy sometimes. To be more specific, in this post we will mimic Java’s support for defining an upper bound for generic elements (i.e. List<T extends Comparable>).

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The feature of function overloading can prove to be pretty useful: it allows us to define a few versions of the same function, which differ in argument types, or even in Arity (ignoring variadic functions for the moment). Unfortunately, the C\C++ pre-processor does not allow overloading macros in the same way; It treats such attempts as redefinitions.

While we do not really need to overload a macro in order to handle different argument types (since macros ignore type information), many times it would be desired to overload a macro such that each version is able to handle a different number of arguments. This goal can actually be achieved through invocation of the VA_NUM_ARGS macro mentioned in my last post, as we will briefly demonstrate (the idea has also been mentioned under the comment section in the aforementioned post).

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The C-Preprocessor is a very powerful mechanism, which offers many different features. One of these features is called Variadic macros: macros that accept a varying number of arguments. It is interesting to note at this point, that such Variadic macros, despite being part of the C99 Standard, are not part of the C++ Standard at the moment. However, a big number of C++ compilers support it nevertheless.

While allowing the definition of Variadic macros, there is no built-in (preprocessor) way of obtaining the actual number of arguments that is passed to a specific Variadic macro. In this post we shall provide a possible macro implementation for such a query.

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Memoization is essentially a fancy name for caching results for future use. A generalization of dynamic programming, if you will.

While I am certain most of us use it one way or another, in many occasions, it is usually through an Ad hoc implementation.. One that is only suitable for the specific, current, use case. Why don’t we generalize it further, and supply a generic, reusable, solution for Memoization?

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Tag dispatching is a technique for compile time dispatching between a few overloaded functions by using the properties of a type. This technique usually involves some kind of type traits.

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Many times we are required to define both a copy constructor and an assignment operator (for example: according to the rule of three, if we need one we are likely to need the other). The two will probably share a pretty common code, if not exactly the same. So what we will do in many cases is export the code to a private method which will be called from both the constructor and the assignment operator, effectively giving up on initialization list benefits in the constructor, or duplicating code.

A pretty nice way to overcome this is by implementing the assignment operator in terms of the copy constructor. However, I will explain later why this suggested way is not really recommended to use.

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The C++ template mechanism is a very powerful tool. Besides its great ability of code generation, it can also be used to make useful computations at compile time. Let us introduce such an example.

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