Dear all, The Pointer Container library is very almost finished. Since the review, the following major changes has been made - improved docs with new tutorial and improved browsing - new indirect functions - new Cloneable and Clone Allocator concepts - support for null values - refactored template interface off all classes - implementation guarantees to only instantiate std::container<void*> - rewritten iterators - improved tests The new docs, and code can be downloaded from the files section: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/boost/files/pointer%20container/ptr_container.... The test runs with vc7.1 and gcc.3.3.3. Comments, suggestions and portability fixes are welcome. There are one major issue and one minor I need to have resolved during the post-review. Minor issue: allocation in map:operator[] ---------------------------------------- should a default allocated object use operator new or heap_clone_allocator::allocate_default(); ? This happens in ptr_map<string,int> m; m["foo"] = 5; // will allocate an int with new Normally the use can control all allocations because he always add objects manually or via cloninin (which he also controls). But the default object is just allocated with operator new inside ptr_map::operator[]. Should some hook be provided in a new allocator concept, map_heap_allocator? Major issue: ptr_iterator implementation. ----------------------------------------- So what is the problem? Well, since void* is used internally, the iterators must cast to the proper type in operator*; that is no problem for the default indireted iterators; the problem is with the iterators from ptr_iterator ptr_begin(); ptr_iterator ptr_end(); One way to define would be to say typedef internal_container::iterator ptr_iterator; Then the reference type would be void*& and not T*& as we would like. So if the user wanted to sort the container, he would do std::sort( cont.begin(), cont.end(), void_ptr_indirect_fun< std::less<T>, T>() ); This give us a rather insecure interface where you have to cast manually to T* inside the functor. So I wish we could get a T*& reference type. I think, from discussion with David Abrahams, that the current implementation is non-portable even though my test works: typedef T*& reference; reference dereference() const { // void_type is void* or const void* // I'm not sure why this is needed, but it seems to be return reinterpret_cast<reference>( const_cast<void_type&>( *iter_ ) ); } Does anybody knows how to rewrite this crappy code propoerly? I think we're faced with three options 1. keep the current behavior and describe in the docs that it is non-portable 2. go back to making ptr_iterator the default iterator with void*& reference type; 3. add a small subset of algorithms to the classes themselves; I'm thinking that the subset from std::list is appropriate: - sort - remove_if - remove - unique - reverse - merge Let me hear what you think best regards -- Thorsten Ottosen ---------------------------- www.dezide.com www.cs.aau.dk/index2.php?content=Research/bss www.boost.org www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/