Friday 16 October 2015

Cool usecase for std::tie()


Until now I only thought of std::tie()as useful for decomposing several return values of a function that is faking multiple return values by using std:tuple:
  bool a; 
  SomeData b; 

  std:tie(a, b) = get_a_b_as_tuple();
But now look at that:
  structS 
  {
    int n;
    std::string s;
    float d;

    bool operator<(const S& rhs) const {
      // compares n to rhs.n,
      // then s to rhs.s,
      // then d to rhs.d
      return std::tie(n, s, d) < std::tie(rhs.n, rhs.s, rhs.d);
    }
  };
Nice, isn't it?

Source: CppCon2015 / Presentations / Simple Extensible Pattern Matching With C++14.

Update:
As it seems, this technique is considered to be pretty standard now, look here. If you are interested in TMP (and param pack expansions ;) you'll find there some techniques to make such comparators more flexible.