Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!iuvax!uxc!garcon!garcon.cso.uiuc.edu!grunwald From: grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu Newsgroups: gnu.g++ Subject: Re: Isn't sizeof an operator? Message-ID: Date: 21 Mar 89 04:11:29 GMT References: <2352@buengc.BU.EDU> <8903202240.AA24954@yahi> <9120@claris.com> Sender: news@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu Distribution: gnu Organization: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Lines: 31 In-reply-to: hearn@claris.com's message of 21 Mar 89 00:14:08 GMT In article <9120@claris.com> hearn@claris.com (Bob Hearn) writes: .... to the list of overloadable operators. However, it would be much nicer if it used the dynamic rather than static information where appropriate, like class/structure element dereferencing!! Are you listening, Bjarne??? Unfortunately, for now, there seems to be no alternative but to keep track of the sizes yourself. Not very helpful, I know, but at least correct. :-) Bob Hearn hearn@claris.com And how should it do this? By sticking an extra field into every variable structured item? How would this field be maintained? Asking the compiler to keep this information is ``against the spirit of C++''. You can do a much better job of it, and in those cases where you *don't* want that information (i.e. usually), you don't pay for it. What's wrong with having you base class have define `sizeOf' or something and using that as a virtual function to determine size of things, as OOPS & Libg++ do? -- Dirk Grunwald Univ. of Illinois grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu