Item 4. Maximally Reusable Generic Containers桺art 1

Difficulty: 8

How flexible can you make this simple container class? Hint: You'll learn more than a little about member templates along the way.

How can you best implement copy construction and copy assignment for the following fixed-length vector class? How can you provide maximum usability for construction and assignment? Hint: Think about the kinds of things that client code might want to do.

template<typename T, size_t size> 


class fixed_vector


{


public:


  typedef T*       iterator;


  typedef const T* const_iterator;


  iterator       begin()       { return v_; }


  iterator       end()         { return v_+size; }


  const_iterator begin() const { return v_; }


  const_iterator end()   const { return v_+size; }





private:


  T v_[size];


};

Note: Don't fix other things. This container is not intended to be fully STL-compliant, and it has at least one subtle problem. It's meant only to illustrate some important issues in a simplified setting.