Re: boost::scoped_ptr rationale?

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:30:54 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<f3d4f9fb-6762-4c1d-8181-a38972817de7@5g2000yqz.googlegroups.com>
On Jul 20, 11:17 am, Juha Nieminen <nos...@thanks.invalid> wrote:

Marcel M=FCller <news.5.ma...@spamgourmet.com> wrote:

Did you ever succeed to instantiate a polymorphic object on the stack?
Probably not. The exact type must be known at compile time for this
purpose. So, no factory pattern.


If you don't know the actual type of the object at compile
time in the current scope, but nevertheless want to use
scoped_ptr to handle it, it would mean that there has to be
some function which you call from the current scope and which
returns a raw pointer to the object it allocated (leaving the
responsibility of deleting the object up to the calling code).


Why? The function declaring the scoped_ptr can decide itself
which class it wants to new. Don't forget that scoped_ptr
supports reset, so you can do something like:

    boost::scoped_ptr p;
    if (someCondition)
        p.reset(new Type1);
    else (somethingElse)
        p.reset(new Type2);
    // and if neither is true, I have a null pointer...

--
James Kanze

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