On 25 Feb 2004 at 5:39, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
From: "Steven T. Hatton"
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http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/docs/papers/cpp_report/
I wasn't going to post this until I just happend to look up at the concluding comment displayed in my browser. I haven't read these papers other than the introductory comments, and this:
[consider the source, see: below]
"I don't know about you, but there's something really scary to me about a language where copying state from one object to another is this complicated. By now, I suspect at least a dozen or two programmers have contributed something new to this discussion. If it takes this many programmers to write a simple assignment operator, think how complicated writing code that actually does something meaningful must be!
The devil truly is in the details, especially in C++ programming."
The Assignment Operator Revisited by Richard Gillam Advisory Software Engineer, Text & International IBM Center for Java Technology-Silicon Valley
[snip...] I think perhaps you should have looked at the original :) This whole discussion dervise not from a discussion of production code, but from a contrived problem designed to test an interviewee's understanding of some of the more difficult bits of C++ (legit, because the interviewees had rated themselves (probably incorrectly) as highly skilled C++ programmers). In the event what he is trying to do is to take two different, non- exception safe, classes, derived from the same base, and change one of them into the other using an assignment operator. Not surprisingly, this is difficult, and I suspect not something you would come across very often, and not something I personally would accept in a program design, regardless of the language being used. alan -- http://www.ibgames.net/alan Registered Linux user #6822 http://counter.li.org Winding Down - Weekly Tech Newsletter - subscribe at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/mailing.html