Instead of writing town->first
I would like to write town->name
. Inline named accessors (Renaming first and second of a map iterator and Named std::pair members) are the best solutions I have found so far. My problem with named accessors is the loss of type safety:
pair<int,double>
may refer to struct { int index; double value; }
or to struct { int population; double avg_temp; }
. Can anyone propose a simple approach, perhaps something similar to traits?
I often want to return a pair or a tuple from a function and it is quite tiring to introduce a new type like struct city { string name; int zipcode; }
and its ctor every time. I am thrilled to learn about boost and C++0x but I need a pure C++03 solution without boost.
Update
Re andrewdski's question: yes, a (hypothetical) syntax like pair<int=index, double=value>
which would create a distinct type from pair<int=population, double=avg_temp>
would meet your requirement. I do not even mind having to implement a custom pair/tuple template class ONCE and just passing a 'name traits' template argument to it approprietly when I need a new type. I have no idea how that 'name traits' would look like. Maybe it's impossible.
I don't see how you can possibly do better than
struct city { string name; int zipcode; };
There's nothing non-essential there. You need the types of the two members, your whole question is predicated around giving names to the two members, and you want it to be a unique type.
You do know about aggregate initialization syntax, right? You don't need a constructor or destructor, the compiler-provided ones are just fine.
Example: http://ideone.com/IPCuw
Type safety requires that you introduce new types, otherwise pair<string, int>
is ambiguous between (name, zipcode) and (population, temp).
In C++03, returning a new tuple requires either:
city retval = { "name", zipcode };
return retval;
or writing a convenience constructor:
city::city( std::string newName, int newZip ) : name(newName), zipcode(newZip) {}
to get
return city("name", zipcode);
With C++0x, however, you will be allowed to write
return { "name", zipcode };
and no user-defined constructor is necessary.