1 Revision History

1.1 Initial Version 2022-06 Mailing

2 Description

2.1 The Issue

During LWG review a few members of classes in the mdspan proposals were identified as problematic, this paper proposes renaming those members.

2.1.1 pointer

The pointer type is provided by the accessor policy of an mdspan. While it actually is accessor_type::element_type* for the only proposed accessor policy in P0009, the requirements for pointer are very loose. It does not need be dereferencable, indexable or most any other thing one would expect from a C++ pointer. The only thing happening with an mdspan pointer is that it is handed together with an offset to the accessor policy’s, access function, which returns a reference.

To make this clearer we propose to rename pointer to data_handle_type, and mdspan::data() to mdspan::data_handle(). SOME_handle_type combined with a SOME_handle() function to retrieve it has precedence in the library, with std::thread which has native_handle_type and native_handle() member types.

In mdspan pointer is serving as an opaque handle to data, hence data_handle.

pointer has uses in the accessor policy requirements, the default_accessor class, and the mdspan class.

2.1.2 contiguous

contiguous is used in the mdspan proposal to indicate that for a given layout mapping map for all values in the range [0, map.required_span_size()) there exists a multidimensional index in the maps index space, that returns that value when used in its mapping operator.

However, the concern was brought up that these values are not necessarily return in a linear order. For example a 1D custom mapping could map the values {0, 1, 2, 3, 4} to the offsets {4, 1, 3, 0, 2}. This would still be contiguous in the sense it is used in mdspan.

To avoid confusing we propose to replace contiguous with exhaustive, indicating that the entire range of possible return values of the mapping operator, is in fact used by the mapping.

3 Wording

Since P0009 is under active revision in LWG exact wording is not proposed, since there is no up-to-date target.

3.1 pointer to data_handle_type

Every use of pointer in the P0009 wording section is to be replaced by data_handle_type. Note: there is a use of is_pointer_v and Pointer in the proposal after merging of P2554, which needs to remain as such (i.e. for the deduction guide in question, it really is a C++ pointer since we have to use remove_pointer_t on it.

3.2 data() to data_handle()

The mdspan::data() function is renamed to mdspan::data_handle().

3.3 contiguous to exhaustive

Every use of contiguous in the wording section would be replaced with exhaustive, which specifically renames the is_contiguous and is_always_contiguous members of mappings (layout mapping requirements, layout_left, layout_right and layout_stride) and the mdspan class itself. Furthermore, two uses of contiguous in prose text in notes will be replaced.