Wednesday, September 15, 1999

My DDJ Article on operator->*

The October issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com/) contains an
article by me, "Implementing operator->* for Smart Pointers." I just
received my issue in the mail today, so it should be generally available
now or quite soon. This is the introductory paragraph:

When I wrote More Effective C++ in 1995, one of the topics I examined was
smart pointers. As a result, I get a fair number of questions about them,
and one of the most interesting recent questions came from Andrei
Alexandrescu. He asked, "Shouldn't a really smart smart pointer overload
operator->*? I've never seen it done." I hadn't seen it done, either, so
I set out to do it. The result is instructive, I think, and for more than
just operator->*; it also involves insights into interesting and useful
applications of templates.

I wasn't thrilled when DDJ insisted on moving all my code examples into
separate listings, because I think it makes the article harder to read.
At some point in the future, I hope to make an HTML version of the article
available at my web site, and that version of the article would have the
code examples mixed in with the descriptive text (which is how I originally
wrote the article). If/when such a version is available, I'll let you
know.

I hope you like the article.

Scott

No comments: