On 5/21/18 7:05 PM, Gavin Lambert via Boost wrote:
On 22/05/2018 13:25, Robert Ramey wrote:
No, that's a perfect example of terrible code that should absolutely generate a compiler error. A narrowing conversion (from a source type that can express more values than the destination type) should absolutely *never* under any circumstances occur implicitly.
I think that tribool is/was designed to promote this and in this case I find it useful and natural.
No, it wasn't. The somewhat-implicit bool conversion (safe_bool) was expressly for use within if statements, as demonstrated in the documentation (https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_67_0/doc/html/tribool/tutorial.html). Nowhere in this documentation will you find implicitly returning a tribool as a bool.
I doesn't have to since void * (safe_bool) can be converted implicitly as bool. And there are many, many cases where this is done. You might not think this is a great idea, but it's a fact. These programs will fail to compile if you change safe_bool to explicit.
Note that explicit bool is also designed to handle the case where used in a conditional context in an implicit fashion, exactly the same as safe_bool.
Maybe, but it doesn't replicate the behavior of the current safe_bool. That is my point.
Explicit bool also avoids the unintended side effects of implicit bool conversions, such as promotion to integer (as pointed out by Peter) and unintended narrowing when returning or passing parameters.
whatever the intention of safe_bool or explicit, they don't produce the same behavior.
Implicitly returning a tribool as a bool should be forbidden for exactly the same reasons as returning an int64_t as an int32_t -- you are losing information, and unless you have explicitly indicated that this was intended (presumably because you know things that the compiler does not), it should be assumed to be a bug, perhaps as a result of a recent change of types or just an oversight.
Now you're re-hashing the design of tri-bool. It works the way it has for many, many years. Its consistent with other components such as std::optional which do the same thing and what many people are happy with. In this case there is a much better case for it than for optional. Not that it matters. It's not a great idea to silently change the operation of a component which has been in usage for 15 years. If this really bugs you, you can just make your own component - just call it trilliam, trit or something else.
I don't think explicit was created to fix safe_bool. In general I support usage of explicit. But in this case I don't think it's a good match.
The explicit keyword itself was not. But "explicit operator bool" itself was, as part of C++11.
actually "explicit" can be applied to conversion operators of all types - intrinsic as well as user defined. I'm sure there was no intent to think in terms of "explicit bool" as some special situation.
(You can use the same keywords pre-C++11 but it will not have the correct effect.)
Hmmm - I was not aware that "explicit" could be applied to conversion operators before C++11.
(Specifically, there's a loophole that allows implicit use of explicit bool conversions when in a conditional context such as an if statement where only a bool expression is valid.)
LOL - Right. That's the root of the whole discussion. At some point long ago everyone thought these implicit conversions were a good idea. I presume they still do as we have optional which include implicit conversions to bool and I'm sure there are some more.
Thus "explicit" by itself disables all the unintended implicit usages of the conversion, and C++11 then enables the one intended implicit use.
Hmmm - I thought that C++11 enables implicit conversion of any integer or pointer to a bool for purposes of if, when etc.
Right. But then I'm imposing your view point on many users programs which already exist. You're basically changing the intention of tribool. You may well have a good argument that the very idea of tribool is a bad idea, that it should never have been made the way it was and that no one should use it, but that ship sailed long, long ago. It's not relevant here.
No, you're the one trying to change the intent.
Implicit bool conversions are a behavioural downgrade and will only serve to introduce bugs.
maybe for components like optional, but I don't see it happening for tribool. continuing to permit tribool implicitly convert to bool - as it currently - won't introduce any more bugs than it does currently - if there are any. I can't believe this is even an argument. LOL - neither can I. FWIW - my original suggestion was to conditionally specify "explicit" and eliminate the safe_bool from from the tribool component. This would solve my current problem and so I was happy when this PR was created. But then we discovered that other effects on current user code. Also it became apparent that using explicit wasn't equivalent to the safe_bool idiom. So making this change would silently change the semantics of a program depending on whether or not it was compiled with the switch std=c++11 or not. I hope it's obvious that this would be a very bad idea. So I considered all this and now I recommend we drop the safe_bool idiom and include an implicit conversion to bool for tribool. This wouldn't have this problem and makes things no worse than they are now. To summarize there are for options: a) leave things as they are. This includes a compile time error for constexpr gcc tribool code. And also includes implicit conversion to a bool return value. b) move to explicit when supported. - which eliminates the compile error but makes behavior dependent to the C++ standard used to compile. It will also break a lot of current user code. c) implement inplicit conversion to bool. This breaks no current code and resolves the current constexpr issue. It does permit t + u where t and u are results of bool conversions. This will be fixed automatically for C++17. d) Separately, there is the option to create a "more correct" version of tribool under a different name. in my view c) is the most practical option given the current situation. d) is an option for someone who has the time available and want's to create, document and submit to boost. I personally don't have the time to do this. So, I would like the person responsible for maintaining tribool to accept this PR. Robert Ramey