Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Friendship and the Attorney-Client Idiom


January, 2006: Friendship and the Attorney-Client Idiom

The Three Ps

Another way to identify candidates for friendship is by using the "Three Ps" (Position, Promotion, and Perception), as suggested by Cline et al. [8]. "Position" refers to the case where the object being operated on cannot be the left-most argument. The stream-insertion operators are the most common example of this case, so Position is really a generalization of the "f is operator<<" and "f is operator>>" cases in the Meyers algorithm. Similarly, "Promotion" is simply another way of saying that type conversions are needed on the left-most argument. Finally, "Perception" is an esthetic judgment as to whether or not the calling syntax is improved by using a free function. Cline and his coauthors appear to be among that rare breed who actually like friend functions, going so far as to state that a friend should be preferred over a member function "whenever it improves the readability of the code" [9]. Although Meyers takes a similar view with respect to free functions in general, he is more conservative in promoting the use of friends; in his algorithm, the use of a friend function is dictated solely by need, not esthetics. And, as if to drive home the point, he states, "Whenever you can avoid friend functions, you should, because, much as in real life, friends are often more trouble than they're worth" [6].

CUJ


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.