Yes, the dot operator is a headache. As soon as you march down the road of a precompiler, you're off to building a new language. I think C++'s grammar is too much of a mess to just tweak the parse tree reliably. I suspect there really isn't a way to win at this - every workaround is partial and involves compromise.
Re:Rust vs C Pitfalls
by duneroadrunner on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @11:40PM
(#13275658)
You know, while C++ references are technically unsafe, there is TRegisteredRefWrapper<> [1]. It's a safe version of std::reference_wrapper. Which kind of acts like a reference. So, if you don't mind me using std::strings instead of doubles, your example could be rewritten like
mse::mstd::vector<mse::TRegisteredObj<std::string>> data(10);
data[0] = "some text";
mse::TRegisteredRefWrapper<std::string> dangling = data[0];
data.resize(100000);
try {
std::string crashing = dangling;
}
catch (...) {
// expected exception (not a segfault)
int q = 3;
}
[1] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus#tregistered...
Oh yeah, maybe. But that would still require the ability to overload the dot operator, wouldn't it? And how would you know when to deallocate the proxy object? And presumably there would be some run-time overhead. Hmm, I don't know if it wouldn't be more practical to create a static tool (or "precompiler") to automatically convert references to (safe) pointers (or iterators).