Value concepts

The value concepts (elsewhere referred to as “object” or “foundational” concepts), describe requirements on type related to initialization, copying, moving, and value comparison. These concepts establish the semantic requirements of value types.

A move-only type is a type that satisfies many of the requirements for a value type except that it cannot be copied.

The value concepts are:

• Destructible
• Move_constructible
• Copy_constructible
• Movable
• Copyable
• Semiregular
• Regular
• Equality_comparable
• Totally_ordered
• Ordered

Note that the easiest way to define value types is to allow the compiler to generate as many special functions as possible. The semantics of those functions will (generally) satisfy the requirements of these concepts.

General requirements

The concepts defined in this section do not include syntactic requirements for new, delete, and operator &. For any type T satisfying any of these concepts, a pointer p whose type is T*, and an object x of type T, the following are required:

• new T <initializer> allocates an object of type T and initializes it with the arguments specified by the initializer.

• delete p destroys the object pointed to by p, causing all of its resources to be released.

• &x returns the same value as std::addressof(x).

Types may overload these operators, but they must behave in the conventional way.

Equality

Given two objects a and b, we say that “a is equal to b” to mean that they have the same value. This does not mean that the objects have the same state or pattern of bits in their representation. The notion of “value” transcends its representation.

The “equal to” equivalence relation is defined by the set of operations supported by types. For example, creating a copy of an object causes the new object to be equal to the original. When two objects compare equal using ==, then those objects are in the “equal to” relation.

An expression is equality preserving if and only if equal operands would yield equal results. For example, given objects x and y of type int, if x is equal to y then x + x is equal to y + y. This expression is equality preserving. In other words, equal values can be substituted in equality preserving expressions.

In these concepts, all required expressions are required to be equality preserving unless otherwise noted.

If a and b are equal but have different types, lexical substitution of one for the other may result in ill-formed programs. This can be caused by a failure to provide the necessary overloads for all cases where equal objects of different type can be used interchangeably.