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Tip 25 of #TuesdayCodingTips - User-defined literals

C++ has many built-in literals for disambiguating types of constants, such as 'u' for unsigned, 'f' for float, or time-related literals from the chrono header (like ms, h, or min).

The really cool thing is that you can define your own literals (since C++11) to make your domain-specific constants more legible. All these literals overload the operator "" with your custom _suffix. The data type that is supposed to be before _suffix is then determined by the function parameter type (consult the documentation for allowed parameter types: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/user_literal ).

Thanks to compile-time computing, these literals don't have to imply any runtime overhead for your code.

An interesting use-case that I found is that literals can be leveraged to make described bool constants without having to wrap them in a temporary.

#cpp #programming #tips