Re: Scope vs. point of construction for an object

From:
Anthony Williams <anthony.ajw@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:48:10 CST
Message-ID:
<uprlrztnq.fsf@gmail.com>
Alan McKenney <alan_mckenney1@yahoo.com> writes:

(Cf.: "separate the declaration and construction of a local variable")

I've run into a situation with a class from a 3rd-party vendor, where:

1. There's no copy constructor or assignment operator.

2. The constructor may throw.

3. I need to use the object at various points in the code.


[snip]

The obvious approach -- use a pointer and "new" -- seems sort of ugly:

     T *t_ptr = 0;

     try { t_ptr = new T( /* long complicated list of constructor
arguments */ ); } catch (...) { /* stuff */ }

     // use t_ptr

     delete t_ptr; // don't forget to delete it

Is there a way that keeps the non-pointer syntax?
Even better would be if I could put it into an object.


You could use an array of char and placement new to construct the
object into the array storage. You could then use a flag checked in
the destructor of some object to call the destructor of your
object-in-an-array when it goes out of scope. IIRC, boost::optional
does this if you use the in_place() factory when constructing it:

boost::optional<T> t(boost::in_place<T>(constructor_args));

Anthony
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