Enlightening Usage of C++11 decltype

Question

I\'ve just seen this really nice talk Rock Hard: C++ Evolving by Boris Jabes. In the section of the talk concerning Higher-Order Generic Programming he say

Answer 1

Your suspicions are incorrect.

void f() { }

Now deduce(&f) has type void, but with your rewrite, it has type void(*)(). In any case, everywhere you want to get the type of an expression or declaration, you use decltype (note the subtle difference in between these two. decltype(x) is not necessarily the same as decltype((x))).

For example, it's likely your Standard library implementation somewhere contains lines like

using size_t = decltype(sizeof(0));
using ptrdiff_t = decltype((int*)0 - (int*)0);
using nullptr_t = decltype(nullptr);

Finding out the correct return type of add has been a challenging problem throughout past C++. This is now an easy exercise.

template 
auto add(A const& a, B const& b) -> decltype(a + b) { return a + b; }

Little known is that you can use decltype before :: and in a pseudo destructor name

// has no effect
(0).~decltype(0)();

// it and ite will be iterators into an initializer list 
auto x = { 1, 2, 3 };
decltype(x)::iterator it = x.begin(), ite = x.end();