Function Template Specialization in C++

friedo writes "About.com has an excellent two-part article (Part 1, Part 2) by Eric Nagler, author of "Learning C++," about "specializing" function templates in C++. "Rather than specifying an explicit type of all of the arguments or the return value in the definition of a function, placeholders are used. This reduces the need to create and maintain multiple copies of a function for different parameter types. But sometimes, it is not possible to write a single function template that works efficiently or even correctly for every argument type. It is in these cases that function template specialization is useful.""

Comments

Why is this here?

[jbrandon]

It's a very basic introduction to a very deep subject. Anyone who knows C++ knows the vast majority of this information.

Plus, the navigation links on the second article are broken.

For some really exciting C++, see www.gotw.ca or www.cuj.com

Those sites have great articles about templates and overloading.

Re:Why is this here?

[orthogonal]

get Andrei Alexandrescu's book Modern C++ Design

Agreed. A mind-blowing book, it will challenge your ideas about how to code.

It's about more than just C++ templates; although its use of templates is revolutionary, the more general and important message of the book is about designing small, re-usable pieces of code that interact gracefully with each other (and to the extent possible, interact at compile-time rather than run-time). These ideas can, in theory, be applied to any langauge that supports class typing; in practice I've used in in pre-generics Java to a small (and non-revolutionary) extent.

If you program in any significant way in C++, you owe it to yourself to get the book, if for no other reason than to re-experience that sense of wonder you felt when you compiled your first program.