Friday, October 26, 2012

The Standard works in Circular Ways

Rummaging around in the C++11 standard isn't all fun and games, but from time to time you come across true gems.  For example, this is from 2.14.7/1 in the standard:
The pointer literal is the keyword nullptr. It is a prvalue of type std::nullptr_t.
And this is from 18.2/9:
nullptr_t is defined as follows: 
namespace std {
  typedef decltype(nullptr) nullptr_t;
}
So nullptr is of type nullptr_t, and nullptr_t is defined to be the type of nullptr.

Um, okay.

Scott
at

5 comments:

  1. Tianyu ZhuOctober 26, 2012 at 12:23 PM

    Probably so that it doesn't get cast to int, right?

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  2. Tianyu ZhuOctober 26, 2012 at 12:24 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Scott MeyersOctober 26, 2012 at 1:05 PM

    @Tianyu Zhu: I don't know why they defined things the way they did, but there are other ways to define things such that casting to int is not permitted (without a reinterpret_cast).

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  4. AnonymousOctober 26, 2012 at 1:37 PM

    That's a somewhat consecrated design, also present in Scala and D. "nullptr" is a bottom type in the type lattice just above the "none" type that cannot be instantiated. As such, it has its own interesting properties - most notably it can be instantiated but only with null.

    Defining nullptr_t as "the type of nullptr" is a simple solution to avoiding introducing a new keyword for that type.

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  5. AnonymousNovember 7, 2012 at 12:00 PM

    For me really surprising thing about nullptr is that it is not a pointer, i.e. std::is_pointer<decltype(nullptr)>::value == false. For me it's yet another defect in the C++11.

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