right angle brackets: shifting semantics

As I showed int this post, using > as right angle brackets was not a particularly good idea, but trying to patch this misdesign even makes it worth. After a bit of experimenting I found an expression that is in fact valid for both, C++98 and C++11, but that has a different interpretation in both languages:

fon< fun< 1 >>::three >::two >::one

So if you have to maintain a large code base with templates that depend on integers that are perhaps produced automatically by some tools, be happy, you will not be out of work for a while: changing your compiler to C++11 might change the semantics of your code.

Advertisement

A disimprovement observed from the outside: right angle brackets

It is long time that I didn’t look into C++, I have to admit. By coincidence I recently unearthed a hilarious example that I had once written that shows the difficulty of parsing some C++ code, as well as for compilers as for us poor humans. It all starts with the >> operator that (supposedly until C++11) could cause problems as in the following:

toto< tutu< 3 >> A;

Here the >> is (was) interpreted as `right shift’ operator and thus this code would create a compile time error. C++11 changed this by introducing the possibility that in that case the right-shift-operator-token closes the two template angle brackets. The argument is that shift operators in template arguments are rare (which is probably true) and so this sacrifices some valid uses of that operator for the sake of causing less brain damage to C++ newbies.