Inline printf compatible with char *

This is no rocket science but I thought this was a really cool solution to the problem.

First I created a helper function Xprintf to interface with an existing C API that works with (non const) char arrays. Hence its char * return value.

char *Xprintf(const char *format, ...);

// This function works in the following situations

foo1(Xprintf("Hello world: %d", 1001)); // void foo1(char *);
foo2(Xprintf("Hello world: %d", 1001)); // void foo2(const char *);
foo3(Xprintf("Hello world: %d", 1001)); // void foo3(const string);
foo4(Xprintf("Hello world: %d", 1001)); // void foo4(const string &);
foo5(Xprintf("Hello world: %d", 1001),
     Xprintf("...", ...));              // void foo5(char *, char *);

Xprintf cannot use just one buffer because the case of 'foo5' would fail (it would get the same pointer twice).

I needed a different return value, like std::string, so that copies could be returned which would clean themselves up as soon as they went out of scope. But std::string does not provide implicit casting to const char *, only explicit casting through .c_str(). The call to foo1 would become: foo1(const_cast(Xprintf("").c_str())), which is kind of ugly!

The following fixes it, creating a tmp_str class that extends std::string and simply provides the implicit cast:

class tmp_str : public std::string
{
public:
    tmp_str(const char *str)
        : std::string(str) {}

    // g++ is fine with adding this one, xlC isn't
    //operator const char *() const { return c_str(); }

    operator char *() const { return const_cast<char *>(c_str()); }
};

tmp_str cHelperCharArray::Xprintf(const char *format, ...)
{
    char buffer[512] = {0x00};

    va_list args;
    va_start(args, format);
    vsprintf(buffer, format, args);
    va_end(args);

    return tmp_str(buffer);
}

A note why tmp_str is-a std::string and not an is-implemented-in-terms-of: the call to foo4 would fail as it would not accept tmp_str as a reference to string (A parameter of type "const std::basic_string,std::allocator > &" cannot be initialized with an rvalue of type "tmp_str".). )

g++ accepts all these foo* functions, but IIRC xlC doesn't like foo2. In that case I had to cast to const. Adding the const char * operator overload would make some casts for that compiler ambiguous.