Templates - Garbage In Garbage Not Out

[ramiro_b]

All,

In a .h file, I am declaring/defining a template as

template<class T> class MyClass
{
public:
void test()
{
haskdfhsjfksfhkfskfsfkklkll89829482498020
gdgk;ek;kd;gkdkd;gdkg;d
}
};

and for some reason, it is compiling fine, even with the 'garbage' in
the function body. Somehow it doesn't see my logic in the body of the
function in compile time. Why? Any help? I am using CC 5.3 (Forte
Developer 6.0 under Solaris 8).

Thanks!

-RB

[mrstephengross]

Since your class is templatized, only a first-pass parse is performed.
The first-pass is simply a syntactic check, not a semantic one. Since
your "garbage" line technically consists of well-formed syntactic
tokens, the compiler doesn't complain.

If, however, you try to instantiate MyClass (ie: MyClass<SomeClass> t;
), the compiler will complain. This happens because when MyClass is
instantiated with a particular class T, the compiler *will*
semantically process the tokens in test().

--Steve