On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 10:27 AM Barry Revzin via Std-Proposals
<std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
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> On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 7:49 AM Jean-Baptiste Vallon Hoarau via Std-Proposals <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
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>> Hello everyone,
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>> I think you are all aware how verbose perfect forwarding is. I haven't seen any proposal that could tackle this (admittedly minor) issue so far, except the one on hygienic macros.
>> So what if we had an operator for casting to a reference?
>> For example, given a value x, than the following could be equivalent :
>> x& -> static_cast<decltype(x)&>(x)
>> x&& -> static_cast<decltype(x)&&>(x)
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>> This would make forwarding a lot less cumbersome to write/read (goodbye decltype(x)(x), hello x&&). However, I don't see many use cases for explicit lvalue cast, and this would be at odd with lambda capture syntax.
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>> Let me know what you think.
>> -Jean-Baptiste
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> I'd written this a while ago (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p0644r1.html), which would be a prefix operator >> for forwarding. This got rejected in 2017, >> is just a bad choice in the context of templates which are already using a lot of angle brackets.
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> Prefix && is a gcc extension so isn't an option. Postfix && looks like it's starting the beginning of a logical conjunction.
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> In discussion of my paper, the possibility of a good-but-nonconflicting keyword was brought up and people suggested declfwd (vote was 0-10) and fwdexpr (vote was 7-5). The best option here seems to be to add some kind of hygienic macro language feature such that we can introduce std::fwd(x) to actually be a function that does forwarding.

I recall that for a time, P0849 which makes `auto(expr)` create a
prvalue of the appropriate type also included `decltype(auto)(expr)`
being equivalent to `std::forward<decltype(expr)>(expr)`. The
committee decided against that, on the grounds of:

> disliked its expert-friendly nature, and concluded that adding this facility would cause the teaching effort to add up.

Which given the convoluted spelling, you can't really disagree with.