8 Statements [stmt.stmt]

8.9 Ambiguity resolution [stmt.ambig]

1
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There is an ambiguity in the grammar involving expression-statements and declarations: An expression-statement with a function-style explicit type conversion as its leftmost subexpression can be indistinguishable from a declaration where the first declarator starts with a (.
In those cases the statement is a declaration.
2
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[Note 1:
If the statement cannot syntactically be a declaration, there is no ambiguity, so this rule does not apply.
The whole statement might need to be examined to determine whether this is the case.
This resolves the meaning of many examples.
[Example 1:
T(a)->m = 7; // expression-statement T(a)++; // expression-statement T(a,5)<<c; // expression-statement T(*d)(int); // declaration T(e)[5]; // declaration T(f) = { 1, 2 }; // declaration T(*g)(double(3)); // declaration
In the last example above, g, which is a pointer to T, is initialized to double(3).
This is of course ill-formed for semantic reasons, but that does not affect the syntactic analysis.
— end example]
The remaining cases are declarations.
[Example 2: class T { // ... public: T(); T(int); T(int, int); }; T(a); // declaration T(*b)(); // declaration T(c)=7; // declaration T(d),e,f=3; // declaration extern int h; T(g)(h,2); // declaration — end example]
— end note]
3
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The disambiguation is purely syntactic; that is, the meaning of the names occurring in such a statement, beyond whether they are type-names or not, is not generally used in or changed by the disambiguation.
Class templates are instantiated as necessary to determine if a qualified name is a type-name.
Disambiguation precedes parsing, and a statement disambiguated as a declaration may be an ill-formed declaration.
If, during parsing, a name in a template parameter is bound differently than it would be bound during a trial parse, the program is ill-formed.
No diagnostic is required.
[Note 2:
This can occur only when the name is declared earlier in the declaration.
— end note]
[Example 3: struct T1 { T1 operator()(int x) { return T1(x); } int operator=(int x) { return x; } T1(int) { } }; struct T2 { T2(int){ } }; int a, (*(*b)(T2))(int), c, d; void f() { // disambiguation requires this to be parsed as a declaration: T1(a) = 3, T2(4), // T2 will be declared as a variable of type T1, but this will not (*(*b)(T2(c)))(int(d)); // allow the last part of the declaration to parse properly, // since it depends on T2 being a type-name } — end example]