Re: Re: Conversion policies

I'm resending this since I've been having problems with
my mail today and it doesn't seem like the previous
response got through..

At 14:53 2003-08-19, David Abrahams wrote:
>Daniel Wallin <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Given a conversion policy which handles conversions
> > xxx -> C++, what should be passed to the converter
> > function so that it can deduce the type?
> >
> > struct my_converter_policy
> > {
> >     template<class T>
> >     T convert(const param_type&, ...<T>);
> >                                  ^^^^^^ what goes here?
> > };
> >
> > The simplest approach would be to just pass a
> > boost::type<T>, but this means partial ordering
> > won't work.
>
>Why?  Comeau accepts this:
>
>     template <class T> struct type {};
>
>     template <class T>
>     int* convert(int, type<T>);
>
>     template <class T>
>     long* convert(int, type<T*>);
>
>     int* x = convert(0, type<int>());
>     long* y = convert(0, type<char*>());

Bad wording on my side, what I meant to say was that partial
ordering can't be worked around on non compliant compilers
when doing this. Obviously partial ordering will still work on
nice conforming compilers like Comeau. :)

> > Also, IIRC, trying to deduce T from
> > type<const T&> results in an ICE on VC6.5.
>
>vc6.5 compiles this just fine:
>
>     template <class T> struct type {};
>
>     template <class T>
>     int* convert(int, type<T>);
>
>     int* x = convert(0, type<int const&>());

Yes, but that doesn't accomplish what I said. This will ICE vc6.5:

   template<class T>
   struct type {};

   template<class T>
   void f(type<T&>);

   f(type<int&>());

Which means T can't be extracted from cv T* cv T& types on that
platform.

>Of course, if you're concerned about partial ordering, vc6.5/7 doesn't
>support it; you have to "help", and the ways I know of helping do
>seem to produce ICEs with vc6.5 when combined with type<...>.
>
>Why don't we go with class specialization, anyway?
>
><snip code>

Because that would mean compilers which can't handle partial
specialization would be screwed if you want to extract something
more useful than just the type in the function signature.

> > FWIW, in luabind, we handle this by decorating the
> > type:
> >
> >    T           by_value<T>
> >    T&          by_reference<T>
> >    const T&    by_const_reference<T>
> >    T*          by_pointer<T>
> >    const T*    by_const_pointer<T>
>
>I guess I don't really understand the motivation, here.  Could you
>say a little more about why you want to distinguish those cases?
>Is there something wrong with the way Boost.Python does this now
>(whatever "this" is ;->)?

Remember that in luabind we handle everything compile time. This is
our way of allowing compilers like vc6.5 to extract T from T& / T*. It
also help with partial ordering.

I'm not 100% sure on how boost.python handles "this", but IIRC it's
handled just by passing the unmodified type as a class template
parameter, is this correct? Something like:

template<class T>
struct rvalue_converter_etcetc
{
    T operator()(..) {}
};

I don't know what's wrong with it, but at least I guess it isn't as flexible.

---
Daniel Wallin



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