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From: James Dennett <jdennett@acm.org>
Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Subject: Re: Proposal: two real uses for the "auto" keyword
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 17:08:44 CST
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Risto Lankinen wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> James Dennett <jdennett@acm.org> wrote in message
> news:3ABF4E68.14646D4E@acm.org...
> > Francis Glassborow wrote:
> > >
> > > In article <99l3nf$7n0$1@news-int.gatech.edu>, Brian McNamara!
> > > <gt5163b@prism.gatech.edu> writes
> > > >(As an aside, I am curious why function declarations are even allowed
> > > >inside functions.)
> > >
> > > Almost certainly for compatibility with C.
> >
> > Would it be sensible to consider deprecating this feature,
> > or removing it altogether?  It seems to give no significant
> > benefit, and plenty of pain.
> 
> The "benefit" is the ability to do overloaded function
> selection in a local scope, by utilizing the name hiding
> phenomenon. 

I'm glad you wrote "benefit" in quotation marks.  I'd love to
get rid of such ugly code at the same time as fixing a real
problem.

> For example, the program...
> 
> void f(int);
> void f(bool);
> 
> void main()
> {
>   void f(bool);
> 
>   f(1);
>   f(false);
> }
> 
> ... changes its behaviour when the declaration inside
> the main()'s function block is removed.

int main, blah blah blah.

-- James Dennett

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