Re: Lambda shortcut?

From: Daryle Walker (darylew_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-08-27 02:30:03

On Tuesday, August 26, 2003, at 10:05 AM, Jaakko Jarvi wrote:

> In our last exciting episode Stephen Love wrote:
>> operator-> *is* overloadable.
>
> It is, but not freely. The return type cannot be arbitrary, say a 
> lambda_functor type, making it not very useful for the LL.

Specifically, the right side of "->" must be the NAME of a class' 
member or member function.  It cannot be any kind of actual object 
(including pointers-to-member).  This restricts the left side to:

1.	A pointer to a (class/struct/union) data object (conventional C 
usage)
2.	A class object with an "operator ->()" that returns a pointer to a 
data object
3.	A class object with an "operator ->()" that returns an object that 
follows rules [2] or [3].

No matter what, "operator ->()" eventually leads to the standard C 
usage.  All you can do is delay the event and build proxy objects to 
obtain the data.

Daryle