Exercise 6.45

Review the programs you've written for the earlier exercises and decide whether they should be defined as inline. If so, do so. If not, explain why they should not be inline.

Solution

Many of the exercises in this chapter can be defined as inline because they are short (less than five lines) and non-recursive. Only our recursive factorial function is not viable for an inline definition because it will most likely be refused to be placed inline by the compiler. These functions can all be defined as inline by placing the inline keyword before the function's return type. For example:

inline void swap(int &i, int &j)
{
    int &temp = i;
    i = j;
    j = temp;
}