Supporting and signature-checking all foreach variations

Ashish Myles marcianx at gmail.com
Sat Feb 25 08:25:54 PST 2012


I want to define a general-purpose centroid computer for point containers
and ran into a couple of challenges. Firstly, here is the basic code

    Point3 computeCentroid(PointContainer)(const ref PointContainer C)
        if (...)    // want a signature constraint for usability of foreach
    {
        Point3 c = Point3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
        size_t total = 0;
        foreach(Point3 p; C) {   // enforce that the container supports this
            c += p; ++total;
        }
        if (total > 0)
            c /= cast(double)(total);
        return c;
    }

I want to have the most generally-applicable version of this functionality
(for const/immutable/etc containers supporting foreach in various ways),
ideally without needing to write multiple versions of this function.

1. Since support for foreach can be added in many ways (with
  ref/non-ref/const variants), I wanted to check if there was any
  signature constraint that could check if the container supports foreach
  as above. I looked into the "compiles" traits, but that doesn't work for
  statements.

  For an opAssign version, I had tried
    if (is(typeof(C.opApply(delegate(const ref Point3) { return 1;}))))
  but this is unelegant because the container's opApply could have instead
  supplied delegate(Point3) or delegate(ref Point3) (although the latter
  would require me to not use a "const" on the parameter declaration).

2. Secondly, TDPL on page 381 says that foreach iterates over C[], if
  C defines the opSlice() function without any arguments.
  However the code above doesn't seem to work and requires me to
  explicitly invoke the slice operator myself like
    foreach(p; C[]) { ... }
  when my data structure clearly defines the following functions.
    Point3[] opSlice() { return _cpts[]; }
    const (Point3)[] opSlice() const { return _cpts[]; }
  Is this a misunderstanding on my part or an unimplemented feature?

3. A more general question: Is there any by any chance a way to avoid the
  redundancy above of defining two opSlice() functions (or two opAssign()
  functions if I went that route -- one for const and another for ref)?
  I suspect that the answer is no, but I just wanted to verify.


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