A few months ago, there was a discussion in this group regarding
recursive template functions and their interaction with automatic
instantiation.  An Eminent Authority made it clear that recursive
template functions are intended to be allowed.  Users pointed out
that they do not work on existing C++ systems.  Implementors
asserted that it is difficult to support both recursive template
functions and fully general automatic instantiation (the only
solution proposed for the general problem involved run-time code
generation).  Has there been a resolution of this issue?

     Yours truly,
     Robert Corbett

corbett@lupa.Eng.Sun.COM (Robert Corbett @ Sun Microsystems, Inc.  Mt. View, Ca.) writes

 > A few months ago, there was a discussion in this group regarding
 > recursive template functions and their interaction with automatic
 > instantiation.  An Eminent Authority made it clear that recursive
 > template functions are intended to be allowed.  Users pointed out
 > that they do not work on existing C++ systems.  Implementors
 > asserted that it is difficult to support both recursive template
 > functions and fully general automatic instantiation (the only
 > solution proposed for the general problem involved run-time code
 > generation).  Has there been a resolution of this issue?

There is no resolution yet. However, the extensions working group of
the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee has started a review of the ``dark
corners'' of the template definition and of the various proposals for
changes and extensions. This was a major topic of discussion at the
Portland meeting (March) and will be one again at the Munich meeting
(July). I expect that the first resolutions will appear after Munich
and that the review and revision will be complete or almost complete
after the California meeting (October).

 - Bjarne