Arguments

The most basic primitive is the argument placeholder. For the sake of explanation, we used the '?' in our introductory examples to represent unknown arguments or argument place holders. Later on, we introduced the notion of positional argument place holders.

We use an object of a special class argument<N> to represent the Nth function argument. The argument placeholder acts as an imaginary data-bin where a function argument will be placed.

There are a couple of predefined instances of argument<N> named arg1..argN (where N is a predefined maximum). When appropriate, we can of course define our own argument<N> names. For example:

    actor<argument<0> > first_param;    // note zero based index

Take note that it should be wrapped inside an actor to be useful. first_param can now be used as a parameter to a lazy function:

    plus(first_param, 6)

which is equivalent to:

    plus(arg1, 6)

Here are some sample preset definitions of arg1..N

    actor<argument<0> > const arg1 = argument<0>();
    actor<argument<1> > const arg2 = argument<1>();
    actor<argument<2> > const arg3 = argument<2>();
    ...
    actor<argument<N> > const argN = argument<N>();

An argument is in itself an actor base class. As such, arguments can be evaluated through the actor's operator(). An argument as an actor base class selects the Nth argument from the arguments passed in by the client (see actor).

For example:

    char        c = 'A';
    int         i = 123;
    const char* s = "Hello World";

    cout << arg1(c) << ' ';     //  Get the 1st argument of unnamed_f(c)
    cout << arg1(i, s) << ' ';  //  Get the 1st argument of unnamed_f(i, s)
    cout << arg2(i, s) << ' ';  //  Get the 2nd argument of unnamed_f(i, s)

will print out "A 123 Hello World"

Copyright © 2001-2002 Joel de Guzman

Use, modification and distribution is subject to the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)