lvalue method

[Stanislav Blinov]

Benjamin Thaut wrote:
> Hi, I'm writing a vec4 math struct and I have a method of which the 
> return value has to be a lvalue so I wonder which is the correct way to 
> do this:
> 
> vec4 Normalize() const { ... } //won't work, not a lvalue
> 
> ref vec4 Normalize() const {
>   vec4 temp;
>   ...
>   return temp;
> } //will this lead to a segfault or not?
> 
> ref vec4 Normalize() const {
>   vec4* temp = new vec4;
>   ...
>   return *temp;
> } //ugly, don't want to allocate anything on the heap
> 
> auto ref vec4 Normalize() const {
>   vec4 temp;
>   ...
>   return temp;
> } //will this lead to a segfault?
> 
> Or do I need to do it totaly in some other way?
> 

If you need to normalize vector inplace, then your Normalize() shouldn't 
be const:

ref vec4 Normalize() {
	// code
	return this;
}

If you want to return a normalized copy of vector, the you don't need ref:

vec4 Normalize() const {
	vec4 temp;
	//...
	return temp;
}