Table of Contents
This part deals with the functions called and objects created automatically during the course of a program's existence.
While we can't reproduce the contents of the Standard here (you need to get your own copy from your nation's member body; see our homepage for help), we can mention a couple of changes in what kind of support a C++ program gets from the Standard Library.
C++ has the following builtin types:
char
signed char
unsigned char
signed short
signed int
signed long
unsigned short
unsigned int
unsigned long
bool
wchar_t
float
double
long double
These fundamental types are always available, without having to include a header file. These types are exactly the same in either C++ or in C.
Specializing parts of the library on these types is prohibited: instead, use a POD.
The header <limits>
defines
traits classes to give access to various implementation
defined-aspects of the fundamental types. The traits classes --
fourteen in total -- are all specializations of the class template
numeric_limits
and defined as follows:
template<typename T> struct class { static const bool is_specialized; static T max() throw(); static T min() throw(); static const int digits; static const int digits10; static const bool is_signed; static const bool is_integer; static const bool is_exact; static const int radix; static T epsilon() throw(); static T round_error() throw(); static const int min_exponent; static const int min_exponent10; static const int max_exponent; static const int max_exponent10; static const bool has_infinity; static const bool has_quiet_NaN; static const bool has_signaling_NaN; static const float_denorm_style has_denorm; static const bool has_denorm_loss; static T infinity() throw(); static T quiet_NaN() throw(); static T denorm_min() throw(); static const bool is_iec559; static const bool is_bounded; static const bool is_modulo; static const bool traps; static const bool tinyness_before; static const float_round_style round_style; };
The only change that might affect people is the type of
NULL
: while it is required to be a macro,
the definition of that macro is not allowed
to be an expression with pointer type such as
(void*)0
, which is often used in C.
For g++, NULL
is
#define
'd to be
__null
, a magic keyword extension of
g++ that is slightly safer than a plain integer.
The biggest problem of #defining NULL
to be
something like “0L” is that the compiler will view
that as a long integer before it views it as a pointer, so
overloading won't do what you expect. It might not even have the
same size as a pointer, so passing NULL
to a
varargs function where a pointer is expected might not even work
correctly if sizeof(NULL) < sizeof(void*)
.
The G++ __null
extension is defined so that
sizeof(__null) == sizeof(void*)
to avoid this problem.
Scott Meyers explains this in more detail in his book Effective Modern C++ and as a guideline to solve this problem recommends to not overload on pointer-vs-integer types to begin with.
The C++ 2011 standard added the nullptr
keyword,
which is a null pointer constant of a special type,
std::nullptr_t
. Values of this type can be
implicitly converted to any pointer type,
and cannot convert to integer types or be deduced as an integer type.
Unless you need to be compatible with C++98/C++03 or C you should prefer
to use nullptr
instead of NULL
.