[webkit-dev] Why Foo& bar and not Foo &bar?

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Sep 15, 2005, at 5:28 PM, Eric Seidel wrote:

> http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?page_id=25
>
> Pointer and reference types - pointer types should be written with  
> a space between the type name and the * (so the * is adjacent to  
> the following identifier if any). For reference types, the & goes  
> next to the type name.
>
> Why?

It makes more sense in C++ to think of reference-ness as part of the  
type. In fact, many C++ programmers will also write the * next to the  
type name, but we decided not to do this to avoid diverging from the  
typical ObjC and C practice. Another way to think of it is that a Foo  
* is accessed through different syntax than a Foo (you use * to get  
the value, -> to dereference a field or method, etc), but a Foo&  
behaves syntactically just like a Foo. If you declare "Foo *bar" then  
indeed "*bar" has type Foo, but if you declare "Foo &bar" it is not  
the case that "&bar" has type Foo, in fact it will have type "Foo *".  
It only makes sense to say bar has type "Foo&".

>
> What if you write:
>
> Foo& bar, & baz?

We don't like multiple declarations on one line either, proper style  
for this would be:

Foo& bar;
Foo& baz;

But even that is not right, because you can't declare a reference  
without initializing it (unseated references are forbidden in C++),  
and you also rarely want a reference as a local variable.

>
> Makes no sense to me.
>
> -eric
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