Once you realise what is happening this is obvious, but it took me a while…
I wanted to write some longs out as character strings in C++, so wrote some code like this:
void writeLongToFile(ofstream& xmlFile, long& value)
{
stringstream stringy;
stringy << value;
xmlFile << stringy.rdbuf();
}
But compile time error after compile timer error followed as I was told that I could not use this code with unsigned long or with const long and so on … but surely these are simple conversions I thought…
…Just me thinking like a C programmer again. Passing by reference is just that – there is no copying or conversion available and so long and unsigned long are fundamentally incompatible.
The solution? Just pass by value – afterall the saving in passing a more or less primative type like long by reference must be pretty minimal – passing the stream by reference is the real saving here (actually, it’s also practical – as we want the output to go to the real stream and not a copy: in C we’d use a pointer here).
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