7 Expressions [expr]

7.6 Compound expressions [expr.compound]

7.6.6 Additive operators [expr.add]

1
#
The additive operators + and - group left-to-right.
Each operand shall be a prvalue.
If both operands have arithmetic or unscoped enumeration type, the usual arithmetic conversions ([expr.arith.conv]) are performed.
Otherwise, if one operand has arithmetic or unscoped enumeration type, integral promotion is applied ([conv.prom]) to that operand.
A converted or promoted operand is used in place of the corresponding original operand for the remainder of this section.
For addition, either both operands shall have arithmetic type, or one operand shall be a pointer to a completely-defined object type and the other shall have integral type.
2
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For subtraction, one of the following shall hold:
  • (2.1)
    both operands have arithmetic type; or
  • (2.2)
    both operands are pointers to cv-qualified or cv-unqualified versions of the same completely-defined object type; or
  • (2.3)
    the left operand is a pointer to a completely-defined object type and the right operand has integral type.
3
#
The result of the binary + operator is the sum of the operands.
The result of the binary - operator is the difference resulting from the subtraction of the second operand from the first.
4
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When an expression J that has integral type is added to or subtracted from an expression P of pointer type, the result has the type of P.
  • (4.1)
    If P evaluates to a null pointer value and J evaluates to 0, the result is a null pointer value.
  • (4.2)
    Otherwise, if P points to a (possibly-hypothetical) array element i of an array object x with n elements ([dcl.array]),65 the expressions P + J and J + P (where J has the value j) point to the (possibly-hypothetical) array element of x if and the expression P - J points to the (possibly-hypothetical) array element of x if .
  • (4.3)
    Otherwise, the behavior is undefined.
[Note 1: 
Adding a value other than 0 or 1 to a pointer to a base class subobject, a member subobject, or a complete object results in undefined behavior.
— end note]
5
#
When two pointer expressions P and Q are subtracted, the type of the result is an implementation-defined signed integral type; this type shall be the same type that is defined as std​::​ptrdiff_t in the <cstddef> header ([support.types.layout]).
  • (5.1)
    If P and Q both evaluate to null pointer values, the result is 0.
  • (5.2)
    Otherwise, if P and Q point to, respectively, array elements i and j of the same array object x, the expression P - Q has the value .
    [Note 2: 
    If the value is not in the range of representable values of type std​::​ptrdiff_t, the behavior is undefined ([expr.pre]).
    — end note]
  • (5.3)
    Otherwise, the behavior is undefined.
6
#
For addition or subtraction, if the expressions P or Q have type “pointer to cv T”, where T and the array element type are not similar, the behavior is undefined.
[Example 1: int arr[5] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}; unsigned int *p = reinterpret_cast<unsigned int*>(arr + 1); unsigned int k = *p; // OK, value of k is 2 ([conv.lval]) unsigned int *q = p + 1; // undefined behavior: p points to an int, not an unsigned int object — end example]
65)65)
As specified in [basic.compound], an object that is not an array element is considered to belong to a single-element array for this purpose and a pointer past the last element of an array of n elements is considered to be equivalent to a pointer to a hypothetical array element n for this purpose.