Re: deleting dynamically allocated objects in a container

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 9 Aug 2010 11:04:20 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<2f94d8fb-58fd-4f29-8e65-08d2d5ee8d82@l20g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>
On Aug 9, 3:51 pm, "subramanian10...@yahoo.com, India"
<subramanian10...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Suppose 'Test' is a class. I dynamically allocate few 'Test'
objects and push them into a vector<Test*>. I want to delete
the dynamically allocated 'Test' objects using a Standard
Library Algorithm instead of writing a hand-written 'for
loop'.

Following is my attempt: (I am using cout statements in the
ctor and dtor only for understanding purpose).

#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <algorithm>

using namespace std;

class Test
{
public:
        explicit Test(int arg = 0);
        ~Test();
private:
        int val;
};

inline Test::Test(int arg) : val(arg)
{
        cout << "From Test ctor: " << val << endl;
}

inline Test::~Test()
{
        cout << "From Test dtor: " << val << endl;
}

inline void delete_pointer(Test* & arg)
{
        delete arg;
        arg = 0;


Purely formally, the above results in undefined behavior. (In
practice, I wouldn't worry about it.)

}

int main()
{
        typedef vector<Test*> Container;
        Container c;
        c.push_back(new Test(100));
        c.push_back(new Test(200));
        c.push_back(new Test(300));
        for_each(c.begin(), c.end(), delete_pointer);
        // just to ensure the element values are zero, print them
        cout << c[0] << " " << c[1] << " " << c[2] << endl;
        return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This porgram compiles fine with g++ and when run, produces the output:
From Test ctor: 100
From Test ctor: 200
From Test ctor: 300
From Test dtor: 100
From Test dtor: 200
From Test dtor: 300
0 0 0

My solution seems to work. But is there a better solution ?


Better, in what sense? Just writing a simple, easily readable
loop is usually the best solution.

My question is: in real-world applications, how do the
dynamically allocated objects stored in a container deleted?


That depends on what their lifetime should be. Cases where
dynamically allocated objects in a container should all be
deleted at the same instant are pretty rare.

--
James Kanze

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