Construction of parameters of contained type

Question

I'm not sure what the terminology to use here is, which is making finding information about it difficult. After this surprised me in my code (hit compile, realized I forgot to update a few places... it compiled anyway and ran without error), I made simple example to verify it with.

I have a container class that contains another class. It has a constructor that takes a const reference to the class it contains. I have another function that takes a const reference to the container class. I can pass the function an instance of the contained class, and it creates a temporary of the container class for me automatically. No warnings, either (-Wall -pedantic -Wextra -Werror).

#include <iostream>

class A { // Contained class.
public:
    A(int i) : a_number_(i) {}
    void print() const { std::cout << a_number_ << "\n"; }
private:
    int a_number_;
};

class A_Container { // Container class.
public:
    ~A_Container() { delete a_; }
    A_Container(const A& a) : a_(new A(a)) { std::cout << "I was called!\n"; }
    const A& getA() const { return *a_; }
private:
    A* a_;
};

void foo(const A_Container& container) { // This func takes a container...
    container.getA().print();
}

int main() {
    A a(147);
    foo(a); // ...but I'm passing it the contained class.
    return 0;
}

Output:

I was called!
147

What is this called? What are the requirements for this type of conversion to work?

I can see that it makes sense for this to work, but is there more to it than compiler magic?

EDIT:

Useful link: What does the explicit keyword mean?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 25 '17 at 02:16

C++ will implicitly construct the container class for you if it has a single-argument constructor not marked explicit. To avoid this happening by accident, it is common to qualify unary constructors as explicit:

explicit Container(const A& a);

Now it won't compile (which in some cases is an improvement, to avoid accidentally "working" code if it is actually wrong or undesirable).

Construction of parameters of contained type

1 Answers1