On 3/18/2011 2:40 AM, Sid Sacek wrote:
I think it's simply stating an intention; the intention being that the current shared pointer is no longer interesting in the shared object; who cares if the shared object gets deleted under the covers. This is the mentality that one needs to have in a garbage-collected environment, since you get the same exact effect when you set a reference to null.
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.