On May 2, 12:11 am, "Alf P. Steinbach"<al...@start.no> wrote:
* Sousuke:
[...]
I.e. Google would design std::getline with pointer argument.
It sounds political.
Obviously. When there are several different, mutually exclusive
possibilities, all of which have valid technical arguments in
their favor, the final choice will be political. Any choice
concerning when to use references and when to use pointers in a
function interface is at least partially political.
From a non-political perspective it's pretty stupid since it
requires extra notation and requires unnecessary bug-vectors,
The "extra" notation is redundancy. Redundancy which makes the
code more readable and more easily understandable. (The
alternatives have other advantages, so in the end, which one you
choose is a "political" decision. None of the usual choices is
perfect, and none provides all of the possible advantages.)
And what do you mean by "bug-vectors"? I'm not familiar with
the term.
E.g. a disease vector is a way the disease can enter your body or a population.
Such as inadvertently passing null-pointers to routines that don't expect them,