This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 114a. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-04-18


1542. Compound assignment of braced-init-list

Section: 7.6.19  [expr.ass]     Status: drafting     Submitter: Mike Miller     Date: 2012-08-21

The specification of 7.6.19 [expr.ass] paragraph 9 is presumably intended to allow use of a braced-init-list as the operand of a compound assignment operator as well as a simple assignment operator, although the normative wording does not explicitly say so. (The example in that paragraph does include

  complex<double> z;
  z += { 1, 2 };      // meaning z.operator+=({1,2})

for instance, which could be read to imply compound assignment operators for scalar types as well.)

However, the details of how this is to be implemented are not clear. Paragraph 7 says,

The behavior of an expression of the form E1 op = E2 is equivalent to E1 = E1 op E2 except that E1 is evaluated only once.

Applying this pattern literally to a braced-init-list yields invalid code: x += {1} would become x = x + {1}, which is non-syntactic.

Another problem is how to apply the prohibition against narrowing conversions to a compound assignment. For example,

  char c;
  c += {1};

would presumably always be a narrowing error, because after integral promotions, the type of c+1 is int. The similar issue 1078 was classified as "NAD" because the workaround was simply to add a cast to suppress the error; however, there is no place to put a similar cast in a compound assignment.

Notes from the October, 2012 meeting:

The incorrect description of the meaning of a compound assignment with a braced-init-list should be fixed by CWG. The question of whether it makes sense to apply narrowing rules to such assignments is better addressed by EWG.

See also issue 2399.