On Fri, Nov 25, 2022 at 6:15 AM Sebastian Wittmeier
<wittmeier_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Hi Frederick,
>
> as I understand your paper a Chimeric Pointer is a pointer to a class inheriting from all
> the listed base classes and supporting the -> operator for members of those base
> classes without additional cast


Yeah that's right. The chimeric pointer may be bigger than
"sizeof(void*)" in cases of virtual inheritance.


> What would be the advantages and disadvantages of a concept with those properties?
> Is the main advantage that the Chimeric Pointer erases the actual type and the function
> with the pointer parameter does not have to be a template?


Please write the concept you have in mind, and I'll compare it to a
chimeric pointer.

The idea behind a chimeric pointer such as
"chimeric_pointer<wxControl,wxTextEntry>" is that it can hold the
address(es) of any object whose pointer can convert implicitly to a
wxControl* and also wxTextEntry*.

Template functions are an absolutely fantastic addition to the C++
language, they have brilliant uses in particular in implementing
containers, but sometimes I just want _one_ function. If I have three
instantiations of a template function, then that's three unique
functions with three unique addresses in memory, and also that's three
different copies of any static objects defined inside the function.
Sometimes I just want one simple function, in particular if I'm
exporting a function from a dynamic shared library.