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Template Metaprogramming with C++

You're reading from   Template Metaprogramming with C++ Learn everything about C++ templates and unlock the power of template metaprogramming

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2022
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781803243450
Length 480 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Marius Bancila Marius Bancila
Author Profile Icon Marius Bancila
Marius Bancila
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Table of Contents (16) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Part 1: Core Template Concepts
2. Chapter 1: An Introduction to Templates FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: Template Fundamentals 4. Chapter 3: Variadic Templates 5. Part 2: Advanced Template Features
6. Chapter 4: Advanced Template Concepts 7. Chapter 5: Type Traits and Conditional Compilation 8. Chapter 6: Concepts and Constraints 9. Part 3: Applied Templates
10. Chapter 7: Patterns and Idioms 11. Chapter 8: Ranges and Algorithms 12. Chapter 9: The Ranges Library 13. Assignment Answers 14. Other Books You May Enjoy Appendix: Closing Notes

Understanding the need for concepts

As briefly mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, there are some important benefits that concepts provide. Arguably, the most important ones are code readability and better error messages. Before we look at how to use concepts, let’s revisit an example we saw previously and see how it stands in relation to these two programming aspects:

template <typename T>
T add(T const a, T const b)
{
   return a + b;
}

This simple function template takes two arguments and returns their sum. In fact, it does not return the sum, but the result of applying the plus operator to the two arguments. A user-defined type can overload this operator and perform some particular operation. The term sum only makes sense when we discuss mathematical types, such as integral types, floating-point types, the std::complex type, matrix types, vector types, etc.

For a string type, for instance, the plus operator can mean concatenation...

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