[Rcpp-devel] typedef and const

[Romain Francois]

Le 20/05/10 15:07, Douglas Bates a écrit :
>
> In the process of converting code to use the Rcpp classes I discovered
> that a combination of typedef and const does not work as I expected it
> to work.
>
> The background is that the C-based sparse matrix library called
> CHOLMOD (used in the Matrix package for R) declares a number of C
> structs such as cholmod_sparse, cholmod_dense, ...  Most of the
> CHOLMOD functions take pointers to these arguments and return pointers
> to freshly-allocated structures.  For brevity I declared typedefs like
>
> typedef cholmod_sparse *CHM_SP;
>
> I had thought that I could replace an argument declaration like
>
> const cholmod_sparse *A
>
> by
>
> const CHM_SP A
>
> but discovered after much experimentation that const CHM_SP A expands to
>
> cholmod_sparse *A
>
> In other words, I can't use const to modify a typedef as I expected.
> Can someone explain why?  Is there an alternative declaration that
> accomplishes what I want?  For the time being I have reverted to the
> full declaration of const cholmod_sparse*

In STL, you often see things like :

       typedef void*       pointer;
       typedef const void* const_pointer;

so I suppose you cannot combine const and typedef.


If you only want convenience, maybe you can use macros instead :

#define CHM_SP cholmod_sparse *


Romain

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Romain Francois
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