There is an ambiguity in the grammar involving expression-statements and declarations: An expression-statement with a function-style explicit type conversion ([expr.type.conv]) as its leftmost subexpression can be indistinguishable from a declaration where the first declarator starts with a (. In those cases the statement is a declaration. [ Note: To disambiguate, the whole statement might have to be examined to determine if it is an expression-statement or a declaration. This disambiguates many examples. [ Example: assuming T is a simple-type-specifier ([dcl.type]),
T(a)->m = 7; // expression-statement T(a)++; // expression-statement T(a,5)<<c; // expression-statement T(*d)(int); // declaration T(e)[5]; // declaration T(f) = { 1, 2 }; // declaration T(*g)(double(3)); // declaration
In the last example above, g, which is a pointer to T, is initialized to double(3). This is of course ill-formed for semantic reasons, but that does not affect the syntactic analysis. — end example ]
The remaining cases are declarations. [ Example:
class T {
// ...
public:
T();
T(int);
T(int, int);
};
T(a); // declaration
T(*b)(); // declaration
T(c)=7; // declaration
T(d),e,f=3; // declaration
extern int h;
T(g)(h,2); // declaration
— end example ] — end note ]
The disambiguation is purely syntactic; that is, the meaning of the names occurring in such a statement, beyond whether they are type-names or not, is not generally used in or changed by the disambiguation. Class templates are instantiated as necessary to determine if a qualified name is a type-name. Disambiguation precedes parsing, and a statement disambiguated as a declaration may be an ill-formed declaration. If, during parsing, a name in a template parameter is bound differently than it would be bound during a trial parse, the program is ill-formed. No diagnostic is required. [ Note: This can occur only when the name is declared earlier in the declaration. — end note ] [ Example:
struct T1 {
T1 operator()(int x) { return T1(x); }
int operator=(int x) { return x; }
T1(int) { }
};
struct T2 { T2(int){ } };
int a, (*(*b)(T2))(int), c, d;
void f() {
// disambiguation requires this to be parsed as a declaration:
T1(a) = 3,
T2(4), // T2 will be declared as
(*(*b)(T2(c)))(int(d)); // a variable of type T1
// but this will not allow
// the last part of the
// declaration to parse
// properly since it depends
// on T2 being a type-name
}