Min and Max values for integer variable at compile time in C++

Question

Is there a simple, clean way of determining at compile time the max and min values for a variable of some (otherwise unknown at the moment) integer variable or type? Using templates?

For example:

// Somewhere in a large project is:
typedef unsigned long XType;
typedef char YType;
// ...

// Somewhere else
   XType a;
   YType b;
   LONGLONG c,d,e,f;
   c = MinOfType(a); // Same as c = 0;
   d = MaxOfType(a); // Same as d = 0xffffffff;
   e = MinOfType(b); // Same as e = -128;
   f = MaxOfType(b); // Same as f = 127;
// Also would be nice
   e = MinOfType(YType); // Same as e = -128; // Using the typename directly
// Or perhaps
   e = MinOfType<YType>(); // Same as e = -128; // Using the typename directly

Answer 1

Use std::numeric_limits, it is there for exactly this type of requirement. You can take a look at this example for the usage.

Answer 2

Check out boost integer_traits.

Answer 3

See this question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1855459/maximum-value-of-int - you can also use "min" in the places where the answers used "max"

Answer 4

Include header <limits> to reach template class std::numeric_limits. The numeric type of your variable is used to find a specialization of that template class that will provide the maximum value via function max() and the minimum value via min(), in addition to several other facets of the type.

Note that the interpretation for minimum is different for integral and floating point types. For the former, it's the most negative value for a signed type, and zero for an unsigned type, but for the latter, it's the smallest representable value, which is very close to zero.