Re: [boost] Re: in/out parameters, codingstylesandmaintenance

From: Floris van den Berg (flvdberg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-05-03 19:06:34

From: "Noel Yap" <Noel.Yap_at_[hidden]>
To: "Boost mailing list" <boost_at_[hidden]>
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 1:32 AM
Subject: Re: [boost] Re: in/out parameters, codingstylesandmaintenance

> BTW, I don't see why shy away from pointers.  Is it only raw pointers
> you don't like, or also wrapped pointers?  Why?  Why don't you consider
> references to be pointers that are implicitly dereferenced (a sort of
> built-in pointer wrapper, if you will)?

Seeing a reference as a special pointer is imo fundamentally wrong. A
reference is an alias for a variable, whereas a pointer is a memory address.
Therefore you never need to check a reference for existence, or deallocate
memory while for a pointer you must. Using a auto_ptr, a wrapper for
pointers, on references is therefore plain wrong. As for in, in_out and out
parameters: you use it to make it apparent in your sourcecode and at
compile-time which function parameters are changed and which not. You need 3
different templates for this. If you propagate everything back to one
dumb_ptr or auto_ptr or whatever you want to call it, you essentially ruin
the beauty of the whole system.

Just my two cents.
Floris