Syntactic sugar for std::array?

[Peet]

Hey,

Perhaps I am not the only one who sometimes is going to write long std::array types, I mean very long types, eg.:

std::array<std::unordered_map<uint32_t, std::vector<std::array<uint16_t, 8>>>, 8> complexArray{};

I had this thought, if it would have been easier to read if the type was written differently:

[std::unordered_map<uint32_t, std::vector<[uint16_t, 8]>>, 8] complexArray{};

The syntax [ type, size ] is basically syntactic sugar for std::array<type, size>.

What do you think?

~Nick

[Daniel Boles]

As much as I hate typing, this seems like a 'slippery slope' thing to
me... why not hijack all kinds of other punctuations as shortcuts for
other types? but what if your commonly used types differ from other
people?

Plus, I feel like using square brackets is likely to make an even
tougher job for the people writing parsers nowadays, what with lambdas
and structured bindings (or whatever it's called now) floating around.

But YMMV

[Nicol Bolas]

We already have a lot of uses for square-brackets as it is: array access, lambdas, and structured binding (depending on how the committees decided). We really don't need more.

Besides, the `std::array` part of that declaration seems to be the shortest part. This wouldn't be a problem if you created a nice alias for that map type.

[Derek Ross]

As Nick Bolas said, usually aliases are the way to simplify complicated types. In this case you could do something like:

   
using arr_t = std::array<uint16_t, 8>;
using vecarr_t = std::vector<arr_t>;
using unomap_t = std::unordered_map<uint32_t, vecarr_t>;
std::array<unomap_t, 8> complexArray{};