Il giorno gio 29 lug 2021 alle ore 02:30 Barry Revzin via Std-Proposals <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> ha scritto:

>
> What would you do if value_at returned a T*? You can't do value_or() on a
> T*, because pointers have very few operations you can do on them (and
> nearly all of those would be straight up invalid in this use-case - which
> does not make for a great API!) you'd either push for some language feature
> that does that or you'd write some non-member function that handles this
> case. Which would be fine for value_or(), but not for any number of other
> operations that work for optional but not for pointers. What if you wanted
> the size of the span there, or 0?
>
> With optional, these things just compose straightforwardly, so:
> m.value_at(p).transform(ranges::size).value_or(0)
>
> How do you do that with a pointer?
>
> Note that neither of these examples work with
> optional<reference_wrapper<T>> either.
>

It seems to me you do need a pointer, because they carry an intrinsic
"optionality" semantics with themselves, yet bare pointers lack the
functionalities std::optional has, such as the value_or() method and
possibly others. As already stated one can't have std::optional<T&> and
std::optional<std::reference_wrapper<T>> is a substitute of it.

But I believe we can have the best of both worlds: we could wrap a pointer
into a special type that std::optional would be specialized over, so that
you can actually do things like

    m.value_at(p).value_or(...);

As in the below example:

int main() {
    test_class test("hello");

    std::cout << test.value_at("hello").value_or("not found") << std::endl;
    std::cout << test.value_at("unexisting").value_or("not found") <<
std::endl;

    return 0;
}

Which would produce this output:

    hello
    not found

I've built a working example on godbolt. Have a look:
https://godbolt.org/z/6K7ahb3v4

Regards,
Fabio