Thread: A non-const reference may only be bound to an lvalue?

  1. #1
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    A non-const reference may only be bound to an lvalue?

    Hello everyone,


    I am debugging MSDN code from,

    http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...ah(VS.80).aspx

    here is my output,

    1>main.cpp
    1>d:\visual studio 2008\projects\test_c4350\test_c4350\main.cpp(21) : warning C4350: behavior change: 'B::B(A)' called instead of 'B::B(B &)'
    1> d:\visual studio 2008\projects\test_c4350\test_c4350\main.cpp(13) : see declaration of 'B::B'
    1> d:\visual studio 2008\projects\test_c4350\test_c4350\main.cpp(9) : see declaration of 'B::B'
    1> A non-const reference may only be bound to an lvalue

    I do not quite understand why there is a warning A non-const reference may only be bound to an lvalue and 'B::B(A)' called instead of 'B::B(B &)'? Could anyone give some descriptions please?


    thanks in advance,
    George

  2. #2
    the hat of redundancy hat nvoigt's Avatar
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    The site you got the code from is the explanation why this warning appears, it's the example code for reproducing it. I'll try paraphrasing it:

    In compiler version 2002, if the compiler had the choice if it would transform an object returned by a function to a non-const-reference or another type, it would have chosen the non-const-reference. 2005 and better will instead opt to cast the value to another type that is passed either by value or by const reference instead. Why ? Well, passing a value that will vanish anyway to a function that will write to that value makes no sense. No one will ever see the results.
    hth
    -nv

    She was so Blonde, she spent 20 minutes looking at the orange juice can because it said "Concentrate."

    When in doubt, read the FAQ.
    Then ask a smart question.

  3. #3
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    In the poster's favor though Microsoft does come up with some fairly cryptic error messages along with equally cryptic explanations in their help files.

    Today we loaded code in C# and the form designer siad it could not load. The error message was long and cryptic and left all of us developers sitting there scratching our heads.

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