C++Now! 2012 slides

Timon Gehr timon.gehr at gmx.ch
Thu Jun 7 14:22:56 PDT 2012


On 06/07/2012 10:53 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
> On Thursday, 7 June 2012 at 20:04:56 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 06/07/2012 08:34 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
>>>
>>> I find this very ugly. To be honest, I would be much happier without all
>>> that mostNegative and common type stuff.
>>> If I want to get the min
>>> between a short and an int I'll just cast them appropriately.
>>
>> The mostNegative and common type stuff is there to enable correct
>> semantics for taking the minimum of signed and unsigned values.
>> Minimum of short and int would work fine without that.
>
> I know what it's there for, I don't think it is necessary. I don't think
> people should be taking the min of signed and unsigned values.

What is important is that they can. ;)

> I don't think it's worth cluttering the implementation for this minor convenience.
>

There is not much there to clutter in this case. Therefore cluttering
does not have a significant drawback. Is it just about aesthetics?

>
>>> I'd much rather have a simpler standard library than a complicated
>>> one for the
>>> sake of a little convenience.
>>>
>>
>> 'min' is not complicated.
>
> It's more complicated than it could/should be:
>
> T min(T)(T x, T y) { return x < y ? x : y; }
>

This implementation is unstable. If you fix that, then I'll agree that
it is sufficient for most cases. There is not really a reason to
restrict the generality of the implementation to this though. What we
have is a strict superset.

> To be honest, I don't think the variadic argument versions are necessary
> either as it is just duplicating the functionality of reduce.
>

It is not really duplicating the functionality. Still, I haven't used
these versions so far either.


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