[SOLVED] C++: this pointer

[kvorion]

I am fiddling around with C++ after several years.
I just wrote a small code snippet to dust off my C++ and I came across a strange thing (apparently) which was not at all familiar to me....I made this simple class:



class IntCell
{
private:
int storedValue;
public:
explicit IntCell(int storedValue);
IntCell();
void Write(int input);
int Read() const;
};


And then I started defining my read and write methods as:



//read value in IntCell
int IntCell::Read()const
{
return this.storedValue;
}

//write value into IntCell
void IntCell::Write(int input)
{
this.storedValue = input;
}


This would give me the error:

16 IntCell.cpp `storedValue' is not a type

After googling I found that this error is encountered when you write something as this.Foo instead of this->Foo.

Accordingly when I changed this.storedValue to this->storedValue, things did start working.

Now my question is this: Is this behavior specific to the GCC compiler? I hav always treated the this pointer as an object more than a pointer during the time I was learning C++ several years ago, and that is how it used to work in other object oriented programming languages like C#. It may be my memory playing tricks with me, but when I was using turbo C++ to learn C++ in college, I think I used to write it as this.foo

Comments appreciated

[samjh]

You have to keep in mind that this is a pointer.

So to put as simply as possible, this is a pointer to your IntCell object, so you need to use the -> dereference operator in order to access its members, just like other pointers to objects/structs.


Now my question is this: Is this behavior specific to the GCC compiler? I hav always treated the this pointer as an object more than a pointer during the time I was learning C++ several years ago, and that is how it used to work in other object oriented programming languages like C#. It may be my memory playing tricks with me, but when I was using turbo C++ to learn C++ in college, I think I used to write it as this.fooNo, it's not specific to gcc.

Turbo C++ was not ANSI/ISO compliant. In fact, there was no C++ standard during its time, so your success with the dot operator would have been due to the compiler's own dialect of C++.