Pointers versus references

English: Image for teaching pointers in comput... — English: Image for teaching pointers in computer programming Česky: Obrázek pro výuku ukazatelů v programování (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some people don’t like pointers – and for that reason, I think, we have references in C++. But as a confirmed pointer person, I find references very hard going.

I had a piece of C++ code that did this:

PartialPage& DoubleTree::oldestPage()
{
	PartialPage& pageToKill = pageTree.begin()->second);
	long timeToKill = pageTree.begin()->second.getTime();
	map<long, PartialPage&>::iterator itOld;
	for (itOld = pageTree.begin(); itOld != pageTree.end(); itOld++) {
		if (itOld->second.getTime() < timeToKill) {
			timeToKill = itOld->second.getTime();
			pageToKill = itOld->second;
		}
	}
	return pageToKill;
}

This produced rubbish results – because re-assigning the reference didn’t make it refer to a new element of the map. Essentially you cannot mutate a reference in C++ at all.

Switching to pointers fixed the problem though.

PartialPage* DoubleTree::oldestPage()
{
	PartialPage* pageToKill = &(pageTree.begin()->second);
	long timeToKill = pageTree.begin()->second.getTime();
	map<long, PartialPage>::iterator itOld;
	for (itOld = pageTree.begin(); itOld != pageTree.end(); itOld++) {
		if (itOld->second.getTime() < timeToKill) {
			timeToKill = itOld->second.getTime();
			pageToKill = &(itOld->second);
		}
	}
	return pageToKill;
}