Comments on: Pointers, References and Optional References in C++

By: Mickey_disqus

Mickey_disqus — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 09:27:00 +0000

On the subject of naming a handle exactly the same as if it was the thing it’s a handle to. Why? That’s not helpful. It’s unhelpful. In my practical experience, being able to know if a thing is a handle or not is very useful. Deliberately hiding that information; what’s the benefit?

“And when reading code, we mostly don’t want to know anyway.”
I jolly well do want to do. Of course I do. A pointer-to-an-object needs very different handling to the object itself. If I go around treating pointers and references and iterators as if they’re the object of interest, my code will start crashing.

It sounds from what you say that you do want to know, but you’re relying on your magic IDE to tell you with a mouse-over rather than relying on the name of the variable to tell you. The principle is the same; you’ve just shifted what you like to look at to know whether it’s a handle or not, from the name to a pop-up box your IDE presents.

By: MPM

MPM — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 12:55:00 +0000

One other thing you can do with pointers as opposed to references — technically this is form of rebinding, but it’s not mentioned explicitily in the post — is pointer arithmetic. (The post gives of an example of direct assignment to re-bind, but not pointer arithmetic).

By: Gerald Squelart

Gerald Squelart — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 05:41:00 +0000

“the convention for references is that they should never be null” — to be pedantic, it’s not just a convention, it’s actually undefined behavior to dereference a null pointer, so you could not create a reference from that and expect happy outcomes. 😀 It’s also UB to access a dangling reference (e.g., if the referenced object gets destroyed).