Skip to main content

C++11 - User-defined literals

C++11 standard provides new way of customized literal constants called user defined literals. Thanks to that user can define own suffixes for standard literals (ex. digits) which defines it better and makes it better readable. Example of such suffixes could be: _meters, _kilograms, _squareMeters etc.

For better understanding user-defined literals concept, let's take a look on the below example code: Output of that code is: In point one we can see concept of operator overloading function which should be used in order to define user-defined literals. In our example we are defining suffixex _meters and _squareMeters which will be used for imporve readability of code of calculations based on that units.

Point II shows how we can use user-defined literals to assign values to variables. Such usage definitely makes code better readable and easier to understand.

Point III, shows how we can use other suffix (_squareMeters) in comparison calculations. As we can see, our units are logically used the same way as normal number literals. However, (thanks to user-defined literals) we can easely understand which units are used in particular case.

Points III and IV, shows how user-defined literals are used in printing its values into console. We can see that values printed from our literals are the same as its numerical values.

 Code of above example can be found on our github account: https://github.com/xmementoit/CppAdventureExamples/tree/master/cpp11/userDefinedLiterals



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blog's new layout

As you noticed this blog has new layout from today. I hope you like it. I think new layout looks better and more modern than previous one. Please, write you opinion about new layout in comments. If you have some ideas how to make this blog better, all ideas are welcomed. Enjoy new layout and blog articles.

STL - count and count_if algorithms

One of the basic and most useful STL algorithms is algorithm which can be used to count number of elements within selected container according to specified criteria. In order to do that we can use std::count or std::count_if algorithm. std::count (firstElementIterator, lastElementIterator, elementForSearch) - is function which will go through container using firstElementIterator and lastElementIterator and return number of container elements which value is equal elementForSearch std::count_if (firstElementIterator, lastElementIterator, UnaryPredicateFunction) - is function which examine range from firstElementIterator to lastElementIterator and return number of container elements which fulfill UnaryPredicateFunction criteria. UnaryPredicateFunction is function having following signature: bool functionName(const Type& a) . So, count_if returns number of elements where UnaryPredicateFunction returns true for. For better understanding let's take a...

C++ Multithreading - Race conditions

In the previous C++ Multithreading article I presented you how to pass parameters between threads. Take a detail look on the output of that example once again: In the first line of that output you can notice that output text from two threads is mixed. You are probably wondering why it happens? It is because we are not protecting resources which are shared by two threads (in this example cout stream is shared in both threads) which causes multithreading's phenomenon called race condition . Because threads switching and accessing to shared resources are managed by operating system we do not know when std::cout stream will be accessed by main thread and when it will be accessed by second thread. Therefore in the previous article I mentioned that output of the example can be little different on your computer than my output example. What's more it is possible that this output will be different for few consecutive invoking of the example on the same machine. It is beca...