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by groos
577 days ago
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I'm not sure what "dependently typed" means but in C++20 and beyond, concepts allow templates to constrain their parameters and issue errors for the templates when they're specialized, before the actual instantiation happens. E.g., a function template with constraints can issue errors if the template arguments (either explicit or deduced from the call-site) don't satisfy the constraints, before the template body is compiled. This was not the case before C++20, where some errors could be issued only upon instantiation. With C++20, in theory, no template needs to be instantiated to validate the template arguments if constraints are provided to check them at specialization-time. |
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To be clear this distinction is not unique to dependent types, either. Most languages with some form of generics or polymorphism check the definition of the generic function/type/etc against the constraints, so the compiler can report errors before it ever sees any instantiations. This just also happens to be a prerequisite to consider something "dependently typed."