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From: marcap@antares.concordia.ca ( MARC ANDREW PAWLOWSKY )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Want pointers on intelligent pointers
Message-ID: <861@antares.Concordia.CA>
Date: 20 Mar 91 00:47:16 GMT
References: <669258004.1@mmug.edgar.mn.org>
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In article <669258004.1@mmug.edgar.mn.org> 
Jim.Spencer@p510.f22.n282.z1.edgar.mn.org (Jim Spencer) writes:

in response to my call for help
>
>Novice curiosity here.  Why do you want your deletion routine to be 
> the destructor?  Presumably you are calling the destructor yourself, 
> at least indirectly with delete.  If so, instead of calling delete, 
> call another member function, say check_delete(). 
> This in turn could call the destructor couldn't it?
> 

The idea I was thinking was something like:

A *A::a(void) {
    ...
    create a new instance of A and return it.
}

A::b(void) {

    A a = a();

    put a into some global data structure such as a linked list.
}

The linked list would be in use, and it is necessary to keep track
how many times the objects are being used.

While I can call a function other than delete, I thought it would be nice
to use destructor oeprator since other people will be using my classes, so
if somebody did


C::c(void) {

    A a;

... all sorts of nifty things

}

"a" would be deleted properly, even though no explicit destuction routine is 
called.