Re: generic question

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Matthew Heaney" <mheaney@on2.com> wrote in message
news:1164132849.967832.310430@k70g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Pascal Obry wrote:
> >
> > You are saying that for every anonymous access type you need to declare
> > a named access type from which allocate/deallocate.
>
> Yes, to implement the factory function and destructor for a (tagged)
> type.  But that's internal to the package that declares the tagged
> type.  The factory function (called by a user of the package to create
> instances of this specific type) should return an anonymous access type
> as its return type.

I don't think a factory function should ever return an access-to-object: it
should return the object itself. If the client needs to allocate that
dynamically, it can; else it can use the function for an appropriate static
initialization.

It has been argued that sometimes you don't want those constructors to be
inherited. In that case, it should return a classwide type, because even
access-to-object is considered primitive and thus inherited.

But, of course, YMMV.

                           Randy.