On 19 March 2010 14:02, Eric Whitcombe
Sorry, if this is a little late to be helpful but I thought I'd add this for historical purposes for anyone looking at this thread to deal with their own problem. All STL containers use allocators to allocate and initialize the memory to store the _elements_ in the container not the node structure. The containers definition of the data structures that support the implentation details are purely internal. The allocator interface is paramterized on the type of the container element.
On that note, does anyone know why allocators are parametrised at all? Since std::vector is the only container that actually allocates from passed-in allocator, it seems like it would have been simpler to just use member templates in a non-templated allocator class. (Parametrised allocators also mean that nested containers have exponential space requirements for their names, which actually crashed my compiler once when I tried to make a deeply-nested container structure in some recursive-slowdown experiments.)