C++ 20: The Core Language

Re:C++ 20: The Core Language by dgellow on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @01:28PM (#21455166)

I guess it's a question of habit. I'm learning C++ during my free time since a few months. I find cppreference.com really difficult to parse. I understand way more of the documentation now than when I started because of the bit of experience I gained, but it is written in a way that makes everything sounds really over-complicated. I remember when I googled for something and arrived at the page about "Value category": https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/value_category. If you're not already well familiar with the language, this page is really hard to understand IMHO.

I found it way easier to deal with Go, C#, and Ruby documentation for example.

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Re:C++ 20: The Core Language by east2west on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:15PM (#21457870)

I don't recommend cppreference for novices. It is by no means an easy read. It is a reference, first of all. It enumerates all possible minutiae exhaustively. Unless you are already familiar, to a degree, with most of the topics, reading it is going to be frustrating. The second obstacle is the terminology. C++ defines a lot of terms that are not in common use in other languages. It takes time to be acclimated.

The reason that it is popular in the C++ community is that it cuts down legalese a lot when compared to the language standard.

Try books first. Meyers and Josuttis write excellent books. The template guide by Vandevoorde and Josuttis is my gateway drug to becoming a language lawyer. It is still hard, but at least manageable.

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Re:C++ 20: The Core Language by jolmg on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @08:20PM (#21458826)

> The following expressions are lvalue expressions: [...] a string literal, such as "Hello, world!"

That's pretty interesting. I'm not even sure how to test the effect of

  "Hello, world!" = <something>

I imagine the reason this is allowed has something to do with how strings decay into pointers.

> I found it way easier to deal with ... Ruby documentation for example.

Maybe in documentation detailing the methods available, but as far as I know, there's no official spec for the syntax nor the details of the semantics of the language.

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Re:C++ 20: The Core Language by gpderetta on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:00PM (#21457718)

Cppreference is great, but it is not the best place to learn the language.

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