&this pointer
Frits van Bommel
fvbommel at REMwOVExCAPSs.nl
Sat Feb 10 15:24:01 PST 2007
e-t172 wrote:
> I've
> noticed a behavior I considered very weird about the 'this' reference.
> According to what I understood from the documentation, it is a reference
> to the object itself,
Correct.
> so coherently, &this should return the memory
> address of the object itself.
Wrong.
A reference in D is different from a reference in C++. If you take the
address of a reference in D, you do not get the address of the object
referenced, but the address of the reference itself.
Think of a D reference as a pointer to the body of the class, with small
differences. For one, casting between references works differently. For
another, pointer arithmetic doesn't work on references. But operators
like (unary) & work the same: in this case, it returns a pointer to the
memory storing the address being referred to.
To get the address of the object from a reference you can cast it to
void*. So in your case, replace "&this" with "cast(void*)this" and you
will see the same address everywhere.
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