[boost] Re: New proposal for boost: carray

From: jsiek_at_[hidden]
Date: 2000-01-09 11:36:35

Gavin Collings writes:
 > jsie-_at_[hidden] wrote: 
 > original article:http://www.egroups.com/group/boost/?start=1656
 > > 
 > > There is a close relative to the array class that is also very
 > > usefull: an array based on just a pointer to some memory "borrowed"
 > > from somewhere else, an array_ref class.
 > 
 > It seems like a useful service to provide, but it leaves the
 > responsibility for construction and destruction of array elements to
 > derived classes.  This is easy for a derived class using a fixed array
 > anyway, but in general,  the derived class would want to just hand over
 > a chunk of memory and get back an initialised (or optionally
 > uninitialised (?) array), and similarly have the destruction taken care
 > of in the array_ref destructor.  IOW it seems to me that since

I wasn't thinking in terms of derived classes with array_ref...
here's the kind of scenario I was thinking of: you're interfacing
to some old Fortran code which has some arrays already allocated
and initialized, and now you want to wrap them up for use in
your C++ code.

 > array_ref takes raw memory and turns it into an array, it makes more
 > sense for it to provide array style initialisation too.

Do you mean the initializer list? I wasn't intending array_ref to
be fixed size.

Ciao,

Jeremy