Can someone please explain the “indices trick”?

Question

I noticed the "indices trick" being mentioned in the context of pretty-printing tuples. It sounded interesting, so I followed the link.

Well, that did not go well. I understood the question, but could really not follow what was going on. Why do we even need indices of anything? How do the different functions defined there help us? What is 'Bare'? etc.

Can someone give a play-by-play of that thing for the less-than-experts on parameter packs and variadic tuples?

Answer 1

The problem is: we have a std::tuple<T1, T2, ...> and we have some function f that we can to call on each element, where f returns an int, and we want to store those results in an array.

Let's start with a concrete case:

template <typename T> int f(T ) { return sizeof(T); }

std::tuple<int, char, double> tup{42, 'x', 3.14};
std::array<int, 3> arr{ f(std::get<0>(tup)), 
                        f(std::get<1>(tup)),
                        f(std::get<2>(tup)) );

Except writing out all those gets is inconvenient and redundant at best, error-prone at worst. Now, let's say we had a type index_sequence<0, 1, 2>. We could use that to collapse that array initialization into a variadic pack expansion:

template <typename Tuple, size_t... Indices>
std::array<int, sizeof...(Indices)> 
call_f_detail(Tuple& tuple, index_sequence<Indices...> ) {
    return { f(std::get<Indices>(tuple))... };
}

That's because within the function, f(std::get<Indices>(tuple))... gets expanded to f(std::get<0>(tuple)), f(std::get<1>(tuple)), f(std::get<2>(tuple)). Which is exactly what we want.

The last detail of the problem is just generating that particular index sequence. C++14 actually gives us such a utility named make_index_sequence

template <typename Tuple>
std::array<int, std::tuple_size<Tuple>::value>
call_f(Tuple& tuple) {
    return call_f_detail(tuple,
        // make the sequence type sequence<0, 1, 2, ..., N-1>
        std::make_index_sequence<std::tuple_size<Tuple>::value>{}
        );
}

whereas the article you linked simply explains how one might implement such a metafunction.

Bare is probably something like, from Luc Danton's answer:

template<typename T>
using Bare = typename std::remove_cv<typename std::remove_reference<T>::type>::type;