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Comment by g15jv2dp | Hacker News Reader

Uh. I'll try to be more explicit. Let's say that someone in a library somewhere has made what you consider to be a mistake. Or they consider something to be a conversion but the constructor is not trivial. For the push_back construction, can you then say what the call does without knowing the types?

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> Let's say that someone in a library somewhere has made what you consider to be a mistake. Or they consider something to be a conversion but the constructor is not trivial. For the push_back construction, can you then say what the call does without knowing the types?

I don't get the point of your question. You might as well ask: "Let's say someone in a library somewhere has defined their type's operator< to wipe your disk. If you see std::less<>()(a, b), can you say what the call does without knowing the types?"

To which the answer is... well, obviously, no. Same answer to your question.

What is this supposed to imply?

This conversation makes me really happy I have successfully avoided C++ for the past two years.

There was very little in this conversation that was C++ specific, so it's kind of baffling that this conversation led you to that conclusion. But in general: yes, that's a good thing. Don't use C++ if you don't need to. It has too many sharp edges and it shouldn't be used unless it's really necessary.

Let's narrow this down even more.

Someone has made an implicit constructor that makes a network call because... people are dumb. This implicit constructor takes an integer.

Does the following code make a network call?

    vec.push_back(4);

That obviously depends on the type of vec, which you've given no information about.

...could it be that

> Without knowing the type of the vector, we don’t know what constructor it’s invoking, so we can’t really say what that line is doing.

Yes? The sky is also blue. Did I ever disagree with either? What point are you trying to make?

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