Subj : Re: Reference , pointer , constant pointer or what ??
To   : borland.public.cpp.borlandcpp
From : maeder
Date : Tue Feb 22 2005 06:29 pm

"David Currie" <curriedr@ozemail.com.au> writes:

> Is there pointer to a SINGLE object(No Incr,Decr) available in C++. If so
> what is it.

Not out of the box, now.

What you can do is define your own type that mimics a built-in
pointer type except pointer arithmetics. Something like

template <typename T>
class MyDecentPointerType
{
  public:
    MyDecentPointerType();
    explicit MyDecentPointerType(T *);

    T &operator*() const;
    T *operator->() const;

    T *get() const;

  private:
    T *myReferred;
};

You might be tempted to also offer implicit conversion from
MyDecentPointerType<T> to T *, but there are problems to implicit
conversions severe enough that many people prefer to err on the safe
side. This is also why I declared the second constructor explicit.

Of course, you can still construct a MyDecentPointerType object around
a pointer to an array element; but once you have a
MyDecentPointerType, it's hard to inadvertently treat it like a
pointer into an array.

.