Sunday, November 9, 2014

Recreator – Standard Stacks

The stack member was changed to a standard stack.  Two local stacks were also changed to standard stacks (in the assign recreate and push with operands functions).  The stack access functions were modified accordingly:
  • The push function was replaced with the emplace function defined as a template member function to forward the arguments to the stack emplace function (see details below).
  • The pop function was replaced with the pop string function with basically does the same thing except is not longer checks if the stack is empty (which was only needed during initial development of the recreator).
  • The top function was replaced with individual functions for returning the precedence and unary operator flag members of the top stack item.  No similar function was added for the string member as there are other functions for accessing the string member: pop string, top append, and new top add parentheses.
  • A new top add parentheses function was added to add parentheses around the string of the top stack item.  This function is only called by the parentheses recreate function.
  • The precedence and unary operator pointer arguments were removed from the pop with parentheses function since they were only used by the parentheses recreate function (which now has its own access function).
  • The stack is empty function was renamed to just empty to be consistent with the other stack access functions (which don't have the stack name included) and with the STL naming convention.
The previous push function resized the stack up by one element and set the members of the new item on top of the stack.  This caused the default constructor to be called for the new item and the values are then copied to the item.  The STL emplace functions allow constructions of the new item to be called directly eliminating the extra copy (one to the function arguments, and another to the item).  To allow the same functionality, the new emplace stack access function was defined as a variadic template member function:
template <typename... Args>
void emplace(Args&&... args) {
    m_stack.emplace(std::forward<Args>(args)...);
}
This utilizes the new C++11 perfect forwarding feature, allowing a function template to pass its arguments through to another function and avoids unnecessary copying.  What the above template does is pass the stack item constructor arguments to the stack emplace function (using the std::forward template function), which are then passed to the stack item constructor when the new item is created on the stack, without copying the arguments.

To use the emplace stack function, a constructor was added to the stack item structure.  The constructor has arguments for each of the three member variables.  The precedence and unary operator arguments were made optional with defaults (from the replaced push function).  The member variables of the stack item were also renamed with the "m_" prefix.

[branch recreator commit 5451552470]

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