On Oct 31, 2012, at 2:45 AM, Richard Biener <richard.guent...@gmail.com> wrote:. > My comment was for isolated code parts that are being rewritten > (I think it was the wide-int class). Consistency comes first.
In the case of wide int, we only use references in one very narrow way. We use const T& as parameters instead of T, to avoid the copy of a large piece of data. Otherwise, we use value semantic for the entire interface and we only do this optimization for one class, wide_int. There is one other use, and that is for the logical operator [], which returns something that can be modified, again, this is for the cleanliness of the interface. Since the entire interface is self consistent, I think we meet the goal of consistency. One benefit of this interface choice is that we can support things like a+b, directly. If we have used pointers, the natural a+1 would not be the value of a plus 1, but rather the nonexistent object that would be in memory after a, which isn't what we want.
