I recently held a presentation on C++11, mainly focusing on rvalues and move semantics. During the presentation the question came up on why the standard committee decided to reuse the “&&”-token instead of introducing a new one like “§”.
Has anyone came across the rationale for reusing &&?
The committee wanted a token that is on a US keyboard. We also needed something that would not break existing code.
&&seemed like an obvious token to use. We were also looking for minimal changes to the standard and the idea of reusing a token instead of inventing a new one was attractive.I credit John Spicer (EDG) with first suggesting
&&as the token at the April 2002 meeting in Curaçao.