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Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 13:40:28 -0500
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
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Date: 2003-03-26T13:40:28-05:00
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Bill Findlay wrote:
> could you explain what is going on in this rather obscure-looking code,
> for the sake of C++ non-gurus like me?

The class funky_array can be treated like an array wrt indexing:
     funky_array<int> fa;
     fa[7] = 10;
This works because funky_array declares an 'operator[]', an
overloaded operator which is invoked through use of [].
Instead of returning the element itself, the indexing operator
returns an index_proxy object, which holds a reference to the
funky_array object itself and the index. This proxy object
has an 'operator Element &' member, that is, a user-defined
conversion operator from itself to a reference to an Element
(int, in our case). When you try to use the proxy object in a
place where an Element is expected, the compiler will use the
conversion operator to convert the proxy to an Element.