C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

29. Consider overloading to avoid implicit type conversions

Summary

Do not multiply objects beyond necessity (Occam’s Razor): Implicit type conversions provide syntactic convenience (but see Item 40). But when the work of creating temporary objects is unnecessary and optimization is appropriate (see Item 8), you can provide overloaded functions with signatures that match common argument types exactly and won’t cause conversions.

Discussion

If you’re in the office and run out of paper, what do you do? Of course, you walk to your trusty photocopier and make several copies of a white sheet of paper.

As silly as it sounds, this is often what implicit conversions do: unnecessarily go through the trouble of creating temporaries, just to perform ...