Question

From a C background I find myself falling back into C habits where there is generally a better way. In this case I can’t think of a way to do this without pointers.

I would like

struct foo {
    int i;
    int j;
};

mymap['a'] = foo
mymap['b'] = bar

As long as only one key references a value mymap.find will return a reference so I can modify the value, but if I do this:

mymap['c'] = mymap.find('a') // problematic because foo is copied right?

The goal is to be able to find ‘a’ or ‘c’ modify foo and then the next find of ‘a’ or ‘c’ will show the updated result.

Answer 1

No, you will need to use pointers for this. Each entry in the map maintains a copy of the value assigned, which means that you cannot have two keys referring to the same element. Now if you store pointers to the element, then two keys will refer to two separate pointers that will refer to the exact same in memory element.

For some implementation details, std::map is implemented as a balanced tree where in each node contains a std::pair<const Key,Value> object (and extra information for the tree structure). When you do m[ key ] the node containing the key is looked up or a new node is created in the tree and the reference to the Value subobject of the pair is returned.