...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
Copyright © 2001 Jaakko Järvi
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
Table of Contents
The advanced features described in this document are all under namespace ::boost::tuples
Suppose T
is a tuple type,
and N
is a constant integral
expression.
element<N, T>::type
gives the type of the N
-th
element in the tuple type T
.
If T
is const
,
the resulting type is const
qualified as well. Note that the constness of T
does not affect reference type elements.
length<T>::value
gives the length of the tuple type T
.
Tuples are internally represented as cons lists. For example, the tuple
tuple<A, B, C, D>
inherits from the type
cons<A, cons<B, cons<C, cons<D, null_type> > > >
The tuple template provides the typedef inherited to access the cons list
representation. E.g.: tuple<A>::inherited
is the type cons<A,
null_type>
.
The internal representation of the empty tuple tuple<>
is null_type
.
Both tuple template and the cons templates provide the typedefs head_type
and tail_type
.
The head_type
typedef gives
the type of the first element of the tuple (or the cons list). The tail_type
typedef gives the remaining
cons list after removing the first element. The head element is stored
in the member variable head
and the tail list in the member variable tail
.
Cons lists provide the member function get_head()
for getting a reference to the head of
a cons list, and get_tail()
for getting a reference to the tail.
There are const and non-const versions of both functions.
Note that in a one element tuple, tail_type
equals null_type
and the
get_tail()
function returns an object of type null_type
.
The empty tuple (null_type
)
has no head or tail, hence the get_head
and get_tail
functions
are not provided.
Treating tuples as cons lists gives a convenient means to define generic
functions to manipulate tuples. For example, the following pair of function
templates assign 0
to each
element of a tuple (obviously, the assignments must be valid operations
for the element types):
inline void set_to_zero(const null_type&) {}; template <class H, class T> inline void set_to_zero(cons<H, T>& x) { x.get_head() = 0; set_to_zero(x.get_tail()); }
A cons list can be default constructed provided that all its elements can be default constructed.
A cons list can be constructed from its head and tail. The prototype of the constructor is:
cons(typename access_traits<head_type>::parameter_type h, const tail_type& t)
The traits template for the head parameter selects correct parameter types for different kinds of element types (for reference elements the parameter type equals the element type, for non-reference types the parameter type is a reference to const non-volatile element type).
For a one-element cons list the tail argument (null_type
)
can be omitted.
The template access_traits
defines three type functions. Let T
be a type of an element in a tuple:
access_traits<T>::non_const_type
maps T
to the return type of the no n-const
access functions (nonmember and member get
functions, and the get_head
function).
access_traits<T>::const_type
maps T
to the return type of the const access functions.
access_traits<T>::parameter_type
maps T
to the parameter type of the tuple
constructor.
The element types of the tuples that are created with the make_tuple
functions are computed with
the type function make_tuple_traits
.
The type function call make_tuple_traits<T>::type
implements the following type mapping:
reference_wrapper<T>
-> T&
T
-> T
Objects of type reference_wrapper
are created with the ref
and cref
functions (see
The make_tuple
function).
Reference wrappers were originally part of the tuple library, but they
are now a general utility of boost. The reference_wrapper
template and the ref
and
cref
functions are defined
in a separate file ref.hpp
in the main boost include
directory; and directly in the boost
namespace.
Last revised: April 06, 2022 at 21:04:39 GMT |