Why would the assignment operator ever do something different than its matching constructor?
- by Neil G
I was reading some boost code, and came across this:
inline sparse_vector &assign_temporary(sparse_vector &v) {
swap(v);
return *this;
}
template<class AE>
inline sparse_vector &operator=(const sparse_vector<AE> &ae) {
self_type temporary(ae);
return assign_temporary(temporary);
}
It seems to be mapping all of the constructors to assignment operators. Great. But why did C++ ever opt to make them do different things? All I can think of is scoped_ptr?
