[cfe-dev] Ideas for member access

[Sebastian Redl]

Douglas Gregor wrote:
>
> On Feb 8, 2009, at 7:57 AM, Sebastian Redl wrote:
>> It seems that, after templates, the only big C++ feature that's far from
>> complete is member access checking. So I'd like to know if anyone has
>> already thought about this and has some design ideas.
>
>
> My only thought about member access checking is that we can safely
> ignore it for a quite a while longer, if we want to, since a
> well-formed C++03 program can still compile even if we don't do any
> access checking.
True, but I need something to do. I don't want to work on templates,
since too many people working on the same thing with as little
coordination as we have cannot end well.
> That said, I think part of the design for access checking is going to
> need the ability to either store a list of access checks that still
> need to be performed, or to be able to walk over an AST and perform
> access checking later. This is required for, e.g., out-of-line member
> definitions:
>
>   class X {
>     typedef int type;
>
>   public:
>     type f();
>   };
>
>   X::type X::f() {  // delay access checking of X::type until we know
> that we're defining a member function within 'X'
>   }
Good point. This makes the most trivial way of implementing this impossible.

On the other hand, is there any place we need to delay checking other
than the typename in a declspec and the name of a declarator?

Sebastian