Sam Partington <sam.partington <at> gmail.com> writes:
I think the important thing here is to provide a consistent behaviour. ptr_map is an extension to std::map, and so should behave like std::map.
As Felipe says, any deviations from the interface of std::map will make it harder to write generic code, and should be avoided where possible.
I think it would be surprising to users if the following two operations returned different types :
(*i).second i->second
I tend to agree. The current implementation of the iterators kinda sucks...it woeks, but I suspect it to be fairly slow. I tend to think that I should simply use std::map<key,T*> instead of std::map<key,void*> underneith and thus don't change the iterators at all. This of course exposes the pointers moer than we would like. -Thorsten