(no subject)

From: Trevor Perrin (tperrin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-03-02 14:04:23

Hello,

I was wondering if there's a way to modify boost::shared_ptr to give it
similar const semantics to "raw" pointers, i.e if

int x;
const shared_ptr<int> a(&x);
shared_ptr<int> b=a;

could be made to fail to compile for the same reason that

int x;
const int* a = &x;
int* b = &x;

does; cause you're trying to do a "conversion that loses qualifiers".  I
tried fiddling with it; I guess you want to express "non-const objects can't
be constructed with const ones", but I couldn't figure out how to do that.  

For example, shared_ptr<const int> didn't work (I'm using VC6 sp4) cause you
can't delete the pointer; maybe you could specialize shared_ptr for const
types or something, but I'm not sure if that works for VC and I'm sort of
over my head here.  So if anyone knows if such a thing is possible, and if
so how to go about it, I'd love to hear it..