I'm currently work on a large code project and wanted to take the opportunity to learn about and use namespaces. All of the classes I've defined reside within a single namespace, Test.
One of my classes, referred to here as Thing, has a unique ID. I need to be able to hold an std::vector of references to some Things, and so I'm using std::reference_wrappers. At points in the program, I need to remove certain std::reference_wrappers from the vector, so I use std::find:
#include <algorithm>
#include <functional>
#include <vector>
namespace Test {
class Thing {
private:
const int id;
public:
Thing(int id);
const int ID() const;
};
}
Test::Thing::Thing(int id) : id(id) { }
const int Test::Thing::ID() const {
return id;
}
inline bool operator==(const Test::Thing& lhs, const Test::Thing& rhs) {
return lhs.ID() == rhs.ID();
}
inline bool operator!=(const Test::Thing& lhs, const Test::Thing& rhs) {
return !(lhs == rhs);
}
int main() {
Test::Thing t1(5);
Test::Thing t2(7);
auto ref1 = std::ref(t1);
auto ref2 = std::ref(t2);
std::vector<std::reference_wrapper<Test::Thing>> v;
v.push_back(ref1);
v.push_back(ref2);
auto pos = std::find(v.begin(), v.end(), ref2);
}
When I attempt to compile this, I get an error:
error: no match for ‘operator==’ (operand types are ‘std::reference_wrapper<Test::Thing>’ and ‘const std::reference_wrapper<Test::Thing>’)
However, if I remove the namespace, the code compiles correctly:
#include <functional>
#include <vector>
#include <algorithm>
class Thing {
private:
const int id;
public:
Thing(int id);
const int ID() const;
};
Thing::Thing(int id) : id(id) { }
const int Thing::ID() const {
return id;
}
inline bool operator==(const Thing& lhs, const Thing& rhs) {
return lhs.ID() == rhs.ID();
}
inline bool operator!=(const Thing& lhs, const Thing& rhs) {
return !(lhs == rhs);
}
int main() {
Thing t1(5);
Thing t2(7);
auto ref1 = std::ref(t1);
auto ref2 = std::ref(t2);
std::vector<std::reference_wrapper<Thing>> v;
v.push_back(ref1);
v.push_back(ref2);
auto pos = std::find(v.begin(), v.end(), ref2);
}
The correct solution is to move the operators into the namespace where Argument-dependent lookup (ADL) can find them:
namespace Test {
class Thing {
private:
const int id;
public:
Thing(int id);
const int ID() const;
};
inline bool operator==(const Thing& lhs, const Thing& rhs) {
return lhs.ID() == rhs.ID();
}
inline bool operator!=(const Thing& lhs, const Thing& rhs) {
return !(lhs == rhs);
}
}
Test::Thing::Thing(int id) : id(id) { }
const int Test::Thing::ID() const {
return id;
}
The same is already done by the standard library with operators such as <<
for stream insertion.