On 3/18/2011 11:00 AM, Eric J. Holtman wrote:
On 3/18/2011 8:44 AM, Kenny Riddile wrote:
But it doesn't state that intention at all. The intention it very clearly states is that something *is* being deleted. The word "delete" has a very specific meaning in the English language. Assigning the shared_ptr to null or to another shared_ptr tracking a different object *does* state that intention, but "delete p;" and "p = 0;" are not, and should not, be the same.
I have to chime in and agree here.
having "delete p" do *anything other* than p = 0 for a smart pointer would be suicidal.
That actually kind of sounds like the exact opposite of what I said :) What I said was that assigning any type of pointer to a new value signifies that you don't care about being able to access the previous value via that pointer. Calling delete on a pointer can only signify that you want to delete what that pointer points to. Since every call to shared_ptr::reset() doesn't result in a deletion, it is inappropriate to equate them. "reset" and "delete" do not mean the same thing in the context of a handle to a shared resource, like shared_ptr.