Summary

Yet again, we have seen the power of C++ to essentially create a new language out of the existing one; C++ does not have named function arguments, only positional ones. That is part of the core language. And yet, we were able to extend the language and add support for named arguments in a reasonable-looking way, using the method chaining technique. We have also explored the other applications of method chaining beyond the named arguments idiom.

One of these applications, the fluent builder, is again an exercise in creating new languages: the power of the fluent interface, in general, is that it can be used to create domain-specific languages to execute sequences of instructions on some data. And so the fluent builder can be used to allow the programmer to describe the construction of objects as a sequence of steps that are familiar in a particular domain. Then, of course, there is the implicit builder that (with the right indents) even makes C++ code look a bit like the...