you cannot treat intrusive lists as values that you can return, this is by concept. a single value(more precicely: hook) can only be part of one intrusive list at a time. there are multiple solutions for this, depending on your code. passing the list by reference to the function, passing an back_insert_iterator as OutputIterator etc.
This seems like a reasonable solution. It makes sense as well considering that I only intended to insert from either the front or back of the list.
clear_and_dispose calls a dispose function. but it is user supplied and it is possible to remove from the list without disposing, but this is intentional again. depending on your use case again, you could A *a= new A[1000]; { list<...> l; l.push_back(a[500]); //more list calls } delete a;
The node list I was speaking of is actually more of a tree. As some of the node-subclasses have list members themselves (of course, in Pascal it is just Node* childList). So it could be quite difficult to flatten. Regards, Freddie.