The duplicate definition works fine in environments where the inline
definition becomes a weak symbol in the object file, but if it gets
generated as a regular definition, the duplicate definition causes link
problems.
In most call sites the return value could easily be made const, which
gives both the reader and the compiler a bit more certainty about the code's
intentions. In theory this may help performance, but it's mainly for clarity.
The comments are based on reverse-engineering, and the unit tests are based
on the comments. It's possible that some of what's in there is not essential,
in which case, don't feel bad about changing it!
I left a third identical definition in place, though I updated it with my
changes to avoid creeping divergence, and noted the duplication in a comment.
It would be nice to get rid of this definition as well, but it'd introduce
headers from the main Moses tree into biconcor, which may be against policy.
This is one of those little chores in managing a long-lived C++
project: standard C headers like stdio.h and math.h now have their own
place in the C++ standard as resp. cstdio, cmath, and so on. In this
branch the #include names are updated for the biconcor/ subdirectory.
C++11 adds cstdint, but to support compilation with the previous
standard, that change is left for later.
The example in contrib works, as does the one in biconcor.
The examples in lm and moses don't work at the moment,
but checking them in anyway as a starting point
for any potential work on them next week during the
MT Marathon.
