Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!bright
From: bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Inline functions
Keywords: What am I doing wrong?
Message-ID: <1935@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 7 Apr 89 20:50:28 GMT
References: <225@zeek.UUCP>
Reply-To: bright@dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 33

In article <225@zeek.UUCP> larry@zeek.UUCP (Larry Podmolik) writes:
<I have a question concerning inline functions: where should they be
<placed?  I don't like putting the body of the function in the class
<declaration, since it makes the class "interface" harder to read,
<especially if you don't care HOW a routine is implemented.

Hurrah! Somebody with good style! Put the inline function bodies at
the end of the .h file, preceding them with a formfeed and a comment
saying the rest is implementation dependent.

<And if you put [inlines]
<in the .h file, which is included in several modules, and the
<compiler decides to treat them as regular functions, won't that
<cause problems when linking (multiple redefinitions of the same
<function)?

If a function can't be inlined, it is made static. The unfortunate
result is that you wind up with a copy in each object file in which
the inlined function is referred to. Though that is probably not worse
size-wise than if they were inline expanded.

Moral: For best results, restrict your use of inlines to *small* functions
where there really is a benefit. Example:

	class abc
	{	int def;
	    public:
		inline int getvalue();
	};

	/* Implementation follows	*/

	int abc::getvalue() { return def; }