
On Nov 29, 2006, at 12:36 PM, Peter Dimov wrote:
I'm not interested in how free it is, just in how useful it is. :-)
<nod> If I were to scale usefulness as: 1. Would never use it. 2. ... 3. Might use it once in a while. 4. ... 5. I'd find it handy sometimes. 6. ... 7. ... 8. Lots of uses for it. 9. ... 10. Have to have it. It might go something like: unique_ptr<T> : 10 unique_ptr<T[]> : 5 unique_ptr<T[N]>: 3 If it costs me a bundle to support a 3 or a 5, I wouldn't even consider them. But these have very low costs in terms of: * Conceptual complexity (simple, intuitive interface) * Run time (none if not used, cheap if used) * Code size (none if not used, cheap if used) * Compile time (extremely little) * Implementation support (little) (those are listed in order of importance, imho of course) -Howard