Douglas Gregor wrote:
I still don't know if using City to identifiy vertices is feasible.
Why not make vertices derive from (or be aggregated with and convertable to) City? It has a whole ton of advantages:
1) The user can just think of nodes as if they were City objects, including easy access to City members. 2) Can trivially build a property map from a member pointer; wouldn't it be nice to say: dijsktra_shortest_paths(g, v, distance_map(&City::distance))
This would be nice, really!
3) graph<Vertex, Edge, Rep> can have Rep=adjacency_list<whatever> as the default representation, so we lose no genericity.
I see only one problem. If vertex== some class derived from City, then the vertex itself, as well as vector<vertex> might be very large and current BGL passes/stores vertices by value almost everywhere. The point about operator* is that it allows access to City (though less convenient), but does significally affect performance. - Volodya