Strange alias behaviour in template arguments

Stefan Frijters via Digitalmars-d-learn digitalmars-d-learn at puremagic.com
Tue Mar 3 05:42:08 PST 2015


So this is a strange thing I ran into while trying to streamline 
some templates in my code, where fixed-length arrays are passed 
as runtime arguments. I started out by trying variant fun2(), 
which disappointingly didn't work. fun3() then did its job but I 
was suspicious and tried fun4() and fun(5), which also worked but 
shouldn't. Is this a bug or am I doing something bad?

struct Connectivity(uint _d, uint _q) {
   enum d = _d; // Number of dimensions
   enum q = _q;
}

alias d2q9 = Connectivity!(2,9);

// Stores fixed-size array of base type T, and the length of the 
array is determined by the connectivity.
struct Field(T, alias c) {
   alias conn = c;
   T[conn.d] payload;

   this(in T[conn.d] stuff) {
     payload = stuff;
   }
}

// Ok
void fun(T)(T field) {
   pragma(msg, T);
   pragma(msg, T.conn);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.d);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.q);
}

// cannot deduce function from argument types
void fun2(T)(T field, double[T.conn.d] foo) {
   pragma(msg, T);
   pragma(msg, T.conn);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.d);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.q);
   field.payload = foo;
}

// Ok!
void fun3(T, alias d = T.conn.d)(T field, double[d] foo) {
   pragma(msg, T);
   pragma(msg, T.conn);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.d);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.q);
   pragma(msg, typeof(foo)); // 2, okay
   field.payload = foo;
}

// Huh?
void fun4(T, alias d = T.conn.q)(T field, double[d] foo) {
   pragma(msg, T);
   pragma(msg, T.conn);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.d);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.q);
   pragma(msg, typeof(foo)); // expect 9, get 2
   field.payload = foo;
}

// Huh?
void fun5(T, alias d = T.conn)(T field, double[d] foo) {
   pragma(msg, T);
   pragma(msg, T.conn);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.d);
   pragma(msg, T.conn.q);
   pragma(msg, typeof(foo)); // don't know what to expect, still 
get 2
   field.payload = foo;
}

void main() {
   double[d2q9.d] foo;
   auto f = Field!(double, d2q9)(foo);

   f.fun();         // Sure, this works
   // f.fun2(foo);  // Won't work without additional alias
   f.fun3(foo);     // Works, so are we happy?
   f.fun4(foo);     // No! This isn't supposed to work...
   f.fun5(foo);     // Nor this...
}

Any thoughts?


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