Let's do front, back, popFront, and popBack!

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-01-29 22:02:07 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu 
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:

> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Will popFront and popBack return the element removed?  Usually that is 
>> the meaning of pop (but not always).
> 
> Great question. In STL they can't because C++ couldn't move values 
> reliably at the time (C++0X still can't IMHO but that's another 
> discussion). D would be able to because it has good support for moving. 
> I just don't want inefficiencies; returning e.g. a large struct will 
> still involve some memcpying even if costly resources are not 
> duplicated.
> 
> So I'm ambivalent about this.

That would seem like another good use for return type overloading:

	void popFront();
	ElementType popFront();

Too bad we can't have that.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/