[boost] Re: Fw: An omnipotant swap?

From: Daniel Frey (daniel.frey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-09-09 07:47:56

John Maddock wrote:
> It seems to me that this may be of interest here as well:
> 
>>The interesting thing is, this is actually implementable right now within
>>the current language - I've attached a sample implementation to the end of
>>this message, hopefully it really is legal code, although I admit that

I think your code is great as it isn't an intrusive approach at first 
sight: No need to flag your class to be swappable. OTOH you need to 
provide a swap function, so you have to take into account that the class 
needs to support it anyway by some code.

Some classes might not do that with a member function swap, but with a 
friend function that has two arguments. Also, most classes that have a 
member-function also provide a free function with two parameters 
resolving to the member functions. That given, this might also be a 
reasonable implementation which might work on more compilers today:

namespace boost
{
    template< typename T >
    inline void swap( T& lhs, T& rhs )
    {
       using std::swap;
       swap( lhs, rhs );
    }
}

ADL should find the better match if T provides a swap(T&,T&), otherwise 
the default from std:: will be used. The question is IMHO which 
requirements to T (in a namespace N) we request:

   void N::T::swap( T& );

or

   void N::swap( T&, T& );

Regards, Daniel

-- 
Daniel Frey
aixigo AG - financial training, research and technology
Schloß-Rahe-Straße 15, 52072 Aachen, Germany
fon: [phone], fax: [phone]
eMail: daniel.frey_at_[hidden], web: http://www.aixigo.de