Surprizing C++ reference-binding rules

Isn’t it amazing? You see a very simple piece of code that looks perfectly fine and wonder why it is supposed to be ill-formed:

  struct foo {
    foo();
  private:
    foo(const foo& rhs);
  };

  void func1(const foo&);

  void func2() {
    foo o;
    func1( o ); // ok
    func1( foo() );  // ill-formed, foo's copy-ctor is private
  }

Although an rvalue is allowed to bind to a reference-to-const, the C++ standard allows a compiler to copy an rvalue to another temporary rvalue before binding it to a reference-to-const. Obviously, you need to have a public copy constructor for that.

I really fail to see the merit in this rule. It seems that every available C++ compiler does not create an extra temporary object here and some of these compilers don’t even bother to report an error in this situation (g++ version 3.4.5 accepts the above code).

Fortunately, the upcoming version of the C++ standard removes the CopyConstructible requirement for reference binding. It makes the code above well-formed.

Source: this usenet thread

– P

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