On 2/9/06, Johan Johansson <johanj@ipunplugged.com> wrote:
while a pointer means that the method will be taking ownership of that pointer.
Well, it's a possibility, but again not necessarily global law I think.
Well, it's obviously not a "global law". But what does pass-by-pointer give over pass-by-reference? There's the possibility of null, but I'd rather do optional arguments with overloaded functions or, for complicated ones, with Boost.Parameter. The only other difference is in ownership/lifetime management ( though I'd rather make that more explicit with an std::auto_ptr or other smart pointer anyways ). I basically don't see any other reason to pass by pointer except for lifetime, which is irrelevant when it's being used as an output parameter since there's no resource ownership transfer. ~ Scott