Problem of undefined behaviour with overloaded methods and overloaded delegate's invokers
knex via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Aug 1 04:07:59 PDT 2017
I came across a strange thing and I am not sure if this is a bug
or just an undefined behaviour of a compiler. Here is some sample
code to present the case:
//
alias BoolFirst = void delegate(bool b, string s);
alias StringFirst = void delegate(string s, bool b);
class Caller {
void call(BoolFirst bs) { bs(true, "text"); }
void call(StringFirst sb) { sb("text", true); }
}
class Writer {
import std.stdio;
void write(bool b, string s) { writeln("bool+string:", b,
"/", s); }
void write(string s, bool b) { writeln("string+bool:", s,
"/", b); }
}
void main() {
new Caller().call(&new Writer().write);
}
//
As you can see, I have two classes, both having two overloaded
methods. Writer has some dummy printing methods for bool and
string, differing with the order of the arguments, while Caller
takes one of these methods as a delegate and invokes it. In
main() I create objects of these classes and call Caller's call()
with Writer's write().
But - as far as I understand - this call is ambiguous, and
compiler does not know what should be done here: calling
call/write pair for bool+string or for string+bool parameters.
Nevertheless the code compiles and the program runs the fist
variant. The funny thing is that swapping write() methods in the
source file causes calling the second one. But OK, suppose that
this is and should be treated as an undefined behaviour. What is
actually disturbing here, is that casting like
c.call(cast(BoolFirst) &w.write) compiles, although is not
necessary, because not casting works the same way, but casting
c.call(cast(StringFirst) &w.write) - which should help here in
calling string+bool variant - does not compile, and the compiler
says that "Caller.call called with argument types (void
delegate(string s, bool b)) matches both (...)", which is clearly
true. Moreover, swapping write() methods again causes the exact
opposite behaviour: cast(StringFirst) compiles, but is useless,
and cast(BoolFirst) does not compile at all.
So, is this a bug, or am I just not getting something? In the
first case, is there some kind of a workaround for the
possibility of calling both variants (without changing the code
of Caller and Writer classes)? In the last case, how should I do
it properly?
I am using DMD32 D Compiler v2.075.0 on Linux.
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