Angel Tsankov wrote:
Is there any interest in a class template which acts like a pointer and guarantees at compile time and at no CPU or memory cost (except when a call to any of its methods is not inlined) that the pointer is not null?
Preventing empty or invalid cases is always good. For example I think it's a shame Boost.Function, Boost.Any and the Boost Smart Pointers don't do it. As for forcing a pointer to not be empty, I suppose you're talking of making overloads of constructor and operator= for `int' and make them generate errors? Do you still provide pointer arithmetic and implicit upcasting? I personally stay away from pointers, which I associate with bad programming. boost::ref already provides a safe way to do what you want, and better IMHO. It is not required to use pointers at all with it. And you *can* get the wrapped pointer resource with get or get_pointer.