Question

I’m testing out user defined literals. I want to make _fac return the factorial of the number.

Having it call a constexpr function works, however it doesn’t let me do it with templates as the compiler complains that the arguments are not and cannot be constexpr.

I’m confused by this – aren’t literals constant expressions? The 5 in 5_fac is always a literal that can be evaluated during compile time, so why can’t I use it as such?

First method:

constexpr int factorial_function(int x) {
  return (x > 0) ? x * factorial_function(x - 1) : 1;
}

constexpr int operator "" _fac(unsigned long long x) {
  return factorial_function(x); // this works
}

Second method:

template <int N> struct factorial_template {
  static const unsigned int value = N * factorial_template<N - 1>::value;
};
template <> struct factorial_template<0> {
  static const unsigned int value = 1;
};

constexpr int operator "" _fac(unsigned long long x) {
  return factorial_template<x>::value; // doesn't work - x is not a constexpr
}

Answer 1

This is how I ended up doing it:

template <typename t>
constexpr t pow(t base, int exp) {
  return (exp > 0) ? base * pow(base, exp-1) : 1;
};

template <char...> struct literal;
template <> struct literal<> {
  static const unsigned int to_int = 0;
};
template <char c, char ...cv> struct literal<c, cv...> {
  static const unsigned int to_int = (c - '0') * pow(10, sizeof...(cv)) + literal<cv...>::to_int;
};

template <int N> struct factorial {
  static const unsigned int value = N * factorial<N - 1>::value;
};
template <> struct factorial<0> {
  static const unsigned int value = 1;
};

template <char ...cv>
constexpr unsigned int operator "" _fac()
{
  return factorial<literal<cv...>::to_int>::value;
}

Huge thanks to KerrekSB!