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<title>Motivation</title>
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<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title">
<a name="boost_optional.tutorial.motivation"></a><a class="link" href="motivation.html" title="Motivation">Motivation</a>
</h3></div></div></div>
<p>
        Consider these functions which should return a value but which might not
        have a value to return:
      </p>
<div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; ">
<li class="listitem">
            (A) <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">double</span> <span class="identifier">sqrt</span><span class="special">(</span><span class="keyword">double</span> <span class="identifier">n</span> <span class="special">);</span></code>
          </li>
<li class="listitem">
            (B) <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">char</span> <span class="identifier">get_async_input</span><span class="special">();</span></code>
          </li>
<li class="listitem">
            (C) <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">point</span> <span class="identifier">polygon</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">get_any_point_effectively_inside</span><span class="special">();</span></code>
          </li>
</ul></div>
<p>
        There are different approaches to the issue of not having a value to return.
      </p>
<p>
        A typical approach is to consider the existence of a valid return value as
        a postcondition, so that if the function cannot compute the value to return,
        it has either undefined behavior (and can use assert in a debug build) or
        uses a runtime check and throws an exception if the postcondition is violated.
        This is a reasonable choice for example, for function (A), because the lack
        of a proper return value is directly related to an invalid parameter (out
        of domain argument), so it is appropriate to require the callee to supply
        only parameters in a valid domain for execution to continue normally.
      </p>
<p>
        However, function (B), because of its asynchronous nature, does not fail
        just because it can't find a value to return; so it is incorrect to consider
        such a situation an error and assert or throw an exception. This function
        must return, and somehow, must tell the callee that it is not returning a
        meaningful value.
      </p>
<p>
        A similar situation occurs with function (C): it is conceptually an error
        to ask a <span class="emphasis"><em>null-area</em></span> polygon to return a point inside
        itself, but in many applications, it is just impractical for performance
        reasons to treat this as an error (because detecting that the polygon has
        no area might be too expensive to be required to be tested previously), and
        either an arbitrary point (typically at infinity) is returned, or some efficient
        way to tell the callee that there is no such point is used.
      </p>
<p>
        There are various mechanisms to let functions communicate that the returned
        value is not valid. One such mechanism, which is quite common since it has
        zero or negligible overhead, is to use a special value which is reserved
        to communicate this. Classical examples of such special values are <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">EOF</span></code>, <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">string</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">npos</span></code>,
        points at infinity, etc...
      </p>
<p>
        When those values exist, i.e. the return type can hold all meaningful values
        <span class="emphasis"><em>plus</em></span> the <span class="emphasis"><em>signal</em></span> value, this mechanism
        is quite appropriate and well known. Unfortunately, there are cases when
        such values do not exist. In these cases, the usual alternative is either
        to use a wider type, such as <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">int</span></code>
        in place of <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">char</span></code>; or a compound
        type, such as <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">std</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">pair</span><span class="special">&lt;</span><span class="identifier">point</span><span class="special">,</span><span class="keyword">bool</span><span class="special">&gt;</span></code>.
      </p>
<p>
        Returning a <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">std</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">pair</span><span class="special">&lt;</span><span class="identifier">T</span><span class="special">,</span><span class="keyword">bool</span><span class="special">&gt;</span></code>, thus attaching a boolean flag to the
        result which indicates if the result is meaningful, has the advantage that
        can be turned into a consistent idiom since the first element of the pair
        can be whatever the function would conceptually return. For example, the
        last two functions could have the following interface:
      </p>
<pre class="programlisting"><span class="identifier">std</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">pair</span><span class="special">&lt;</span><span class="keyword">char</span><span class="special">,</span><span class="keyword">bool</span><span class="special">&gt;</span> <span class="identifier">get_async_input</span><span class="special">();</span>
<span class="identifier">std</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">pair</span><span class="special">&lt;</span><span class="identifier">point</span><span class="special">,</span><span class="keyword">bool</span><span class="special">&gt;</span> <span class="identifier">polygon</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">get_any_point_effectively_inside</span><span class="special">();</span>
</pre>
<p>
        These functions use a consistent interface for dealing with possibly nonexistent
        results:
      </p>
<pre class="programlisting"><span class="identifier">std</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">pair</span><span class="special">&lt;</span><span class="identifier">point</span><span class="special">,</span><span class="keyword">bool</span><span class="special">&gt;</span> <span class="identifier">p</span> <span class="special">=</span> <span class="identifier">poly</span><span class="special">.</span><span class="identifier">get_any_point_effectively_inside</span><span class="special">();</span>
<span class="keyword">if</span> <span class="special">(</span> <span class="identifier">p</span><span class="special">.</span><span class="identifier">second</span> <span class="special">)</span>
    <span class="identifier">flood_fill</span><span class="special">(</span><span class="identifier">p</span><span class="special">.</span><span class="identifier">first</span><span class="special">);</span>
</pre>
<p>
        However, not only is this quite a burden syntactically, it is also error
        prone since the user can easily use the function result (first element of
        the pair) without ever checking if it has a valid value.
      </p>
<p>
        Clearly, we need a better idiom.
      </p>
</div>
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<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright &#169; 2003-2007 Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal<br>Copyright &#169; 2014 Andrzej Krzemie&#324;ski<p>
        Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
        file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
      </p>
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