Using the template keyword as a hint

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Just as the typename keyword helps the compiler when a type identifier is not expected, there is also a potential difficulty with tokens that are not identifiers, such as the < and > characters. Sometimes these represent the less-than or greater-than symbols, and sometimes they delimit template parameter lists. As an example, we ll once more use the bitset class:

The bitset class supports conversion to string object via its to_string member function. To support multiple string classes, to_string is itself a template, following the pattern established by the basic_string template discussed in Chapter 3. The declaration of to_string inside of bitset looks like this:

Our bitsetToString( ) function template above requests different types of string representations of a bitset. To get a wide string, for instance, you change the call to the following:

Note that basic_string uses default template arguments, so we don t need to repeat the char_traits and allocator arguments in the return value. Unfortunately, bitset::to_string does not use default arguments. Using bitsetToString<char>( bs) is more convenient than typing a fully-qualified call to bs.template to_string<char, char_traits, allocator<char> >( ) every time.

The return statement in bitsetToString( ) contains the template keyword in an odd place right after the dot operator applied to the bitset object bs. This is because when the template is parsed, the < character after the to_string token would be interpreted as a less-than operation instead of the beginning of a template argument list. The template keyword used in this context tells the compiler that what follows is the name of a template, causing the < character to be interpreted correctly. The same reasoning applies to the -> and ::operators when applied to templates. As with the typename keyword, this template disambiguation technique can only be used within template code.[52]