On Monday, October 31, 2011 22:26:16 Olaf van der Spek wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 9:51 PM, Andrey Semashev
<andrey.semashev@gmail.com> wrote:
Is (almost) nobody using scoped/shared_array?
I'm using it, from time to time. Frankly, I'm not sure there's much value in the suggested improvement. Smart pointers are not containers, so there's no need to follow the interface, especially considering ambiguities like boost::scoped_array<unsigned char> A(0); (is 0 a null pointer or a zero size of the array here?). Zero sized arrays are quite valid when dynamically allocated (the allocation result is not NULL in this case), so you can't always initialize the pointer to NULL in this case.
Why not? Does the pointer matter if the size is 0?
It does, if it must not be NULL or NULL is a reserved value. In any case, the smart pointer should not alter semantics of the basic language constructs. This would be most counter-intuitive, IMHO.