Hyrum K. Wright wrote:
> Blair Zajac wrote:
>>> Branko Čibej wrote:
>>>> Hyrum K. Wright wrote:
>>>>> Interesting. The standards committee must have included the implicit
>>>>> conversion operator capabilities for /some/ reason, though. If the
>>>>> only
>>>>> reason *not* to use it is that there's "too much magic" going on, I'm
>>>>> not sure that I completely buy that. I'm just concerned that we're
>>>>> throwing the baby out with the bathwater in an attempt to make things
>>>>> foolproof.
>>>>>
>>>> Like many interesting features of C++ (and C), implicit conversions can
>>>> be indispensable in some cases, but are dangerous most of the time. If
>>>> you don't need them, don't use them.
>>>>
>>>> In this case, the you can get the syntactic sugar by adding inline
>>>> overloaded functions that accept a const Path& to wrap the API
>>>> functions. The effect on the syntax is the same, but you avoid the
>>>> dangers of the implicit conversion being triggered when you don't
>>>> actually want it, due to an all-to-easy programming error.
>>>>
>>>> To turn your argument around: The standards committee included the
>>>> 'explicit' keyword so that programmers can create single-argument
>>>> constructors that aren't implicit conversions precisely because implicit
>>>> conversions are so inconvenient in the general case.
>>> So, I've been thinking about this for quite a bit today. I even googled
>>> around for a bit to see what the general feel was about implicit type
>>> conversion. I was surprise to find that it was almost uniformly the
>>> same sentiment which Blair and Brane have shared. It seems that
>>> implicit type conversion is almost universally considered Evil, and to
>>> be avoided; a feeling I was not aware of.
>>>
>>> The method mentioned above is a valid one, but also feels like overkill
>>> for our use case. The functions in which we've made the changes *are*
>>> the wrappers, and it would be redundant to introduce yet another
>>> wrapping layer just to provide syntactic sugar.
>>>
>>> So, the simplest thing seems to just revert r24541, r24557 and r24558,
>>> and see where we go from there. I may wait a couple of days to do that,
>>> though, to see if others want to chime in on this conversation.
>> +1.
>
> Done in r24595.
>
> -Hyrum
>
Hyrum,
Thanks!
Regards,
Blair
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Received on Mon Apr 16 23:37:22 2007