A destructor Shall OR shall not be declared with a pointer ? in C++

Question

In C++0x -n3290 Draft : they added in section :Destructors : 12.4/2nd point last line

          **A destructor shall not be declared with a ref-qualifier.**

In c++03 Draft .... they didn't mention this point in destructors ?

my question is whether

   *~S() ;   //this declaration is allowed or not according to the Standard's
   //**~S(); ***~S() ; etc...........

this type of declaration is allowed ? No where in the Draft he described about this ...Declaration?

In GCC 4.6.0,Sun/Oracle C++12.0 , --->this declaration is allowed int Comeau C/C++ -->not allowed

Answer 1

That doesn't look like it would ever be a legal function declaration of any kind, much less for a destructor. I'm not positive what that part of the standard is talking about, but I have a guess.

I suspect there is a qualifier saying that your function is being called on an rvalue reference. Something like this:

class A {
 public:
   void IAmAnRValue() &&;
};

I think the language in the standard is saying that this qualifier is not allowed on a destructor, much like having a trailing const would also be illegal.

And, on further investigation, my certainty of the correctness of my surmise goes up considerably. Here is the justification:

• Extending Move Semantics to *this.

There it clearly states that functions may now have a 'ref-qualifier' after the 'cv-qualifer'. This means that a function declaration may now be followed by const & or const volatile && instead of just const. And the term used (ref-qualifier) is the same as the term used in the little bit of the standard you're quoting. And it makes sense for destructors to not be able to have one.