A slightly less banal use of static_assert

The examples used for demonstrating the use of C++0x‘s static_assert are usually pretty unimaginative, for example MSDN (among many others) uses something along the lines of:

static_assert(sizeof(void *) == 4,
              "64-bit code generation is not supported.");

While preparing a presentation for our group about VC10 I came up with a slightly sexier example (for über nerdy values of sexy).

string to_string(int i)
{
	char buff[16];
	static_assert(std::numeric_limits::digits10 < _countof(buff) -1,
		 "int won't fit in buffer");

	_itoa_s(i, buff, 10);
	return string(buff);
}

The cool thing is that VS10 displays compilation errors as design time, this is what it looks like  when I delete the 1 from buff’s size.