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Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:25:13 -0500
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: What's wrong with C++?
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Date: 2011-02-17T11:25:13-05:00
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On 2/17/2011 11:12 AM, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:38:25 -0500, Peter C. Chapin wrote:
>> Could you elaborate a little on why you think type inference is bad?
>
>A variety of objections...

And your objections are wrong because there are plenty
of types that can usefully be inferred by the compiler
and which can be written by the programmer only with
difficulty (at least in C++). Iterators over containers
are a prime example. If I have a C++ map<string, int>
and I look something up, I have to declare
     map<string, int>::iterator i = my_map.find("hello");
But that's silly - the compiler knows what type that
function returns, and it has a better chance of getting
it right than I do:
     auto i = my_map.find("hello");
will be supported by soon-to-be-standard C++. For now,
people dedicated to not sprinkling their code with these
iterator types have to push to a type-inferring template:
     template <typename T> void do_something(T i);
     do_something(my_map.find("hello"));