structured binding with [[maybe_unused]]

Question

Functional languages with pattern matching (sometimes?) have the possibility to ignore some bound values, but with C++17 structured bindings there seem to be no way to do th

Answer 1

In the structure bindings paper:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0144r2.pdf

they discuss their reasoning:

3.8 Should there be a way to explicitly ignore components?

The motivation would be to silence compiler warnings about unused names.

We think the answer should be “not yet.” This is not motivated by use cases (silencing compiler warnings is a motivation, but it is not a use case per se), and is best left until we can revisit this in the context of a more general pattern matching proposal where this should fall out as a special case.

Symmetry with std::tie would suggest using something like a std::ignore:

   tuple f(); 
   auto [x, std::ignore, z] = f(); // NOT proposed: ignore second element 

However, this feels awkward.

Anticipating pattern matching in the language could suggest a wildcard like _ or *, but since we do not yet have pattern matching it is premature to pick a syntax that we know will be compatible. This is a pure extension that can wait to be considered with pattern matching.

Although this does not explicitly address [[maybe_unused]], I assume the reasoning might be the same. Stopping compiler warnings is not a use-case.