More On Templates

Templating our Array

Let’s revisit our Example: Multidimensional Contiguous Array, and make the data type a template parameter. Then we can create an array of int as:

Array<int> x(4, 3);

static_assert

Notice that we can create an Array<std::string>—but that’s really not our intent, and we are likely going to do things that only make sense with numbers.

Array<std::string> x(5, 5, "x");

We can add a static_assert to disallow this—a static assert is evaluated at compile time. Just instead of our Array constructor, we just add:

static_assert (std::is_arithmetic_v<T>);

This ensures that T is an arithmetic type (integer or floating point type).

Note

This is defined in <type_traits>

There are additional type checks like is_integral_v and is_floating_point_v