🚀 go-pugleaf

jimad@microsoft.UUCP (Jim ADCOCK) writes:
>        shouldn't overloaded operator deletes also support a first parameter
> of reference-to-void-pointer, so that programmers can implement their own
> operator deletes that change pointers to null [or some other value]
> as a side-effect of deleting via that pointer?

That's an interesting thought.  It's not quite that simple, though, since a
typed pointer is not compatible with a void*& and, in general, can't be.  On
some architectures, the representation of an address as a void* is different
from the representation of that same address expressed as a pointer to some
other data type.  In order to implement your suggestion, it would require
that all pointers be required to have the void* representation and would
introduce an implicit cast of the operand of "delete" to void*& before
invoking the operator delete().  The latter is just a definitional thing,
but the former could have significant performance impact.

-- William M. Miller, Glockenspiel, Ltd.
   wmm@world.std.com