Question

I am reading the implementation of auto_ptr in C++ STL.

I see that commonly needed operations on pointers like -> and * are overloaded so that they retain the same meaning. However, will pointer arithmetic work on auto pointers?

Say I have an array of auto pointers and I want to be able to do something like array + 1 and expect to get the address of the 2nd element of the array. How do I get it?

I don’t have any practical application for this requirement, just asking out of curiosity.

Answer 1

An auto_ptr can only point to a single element, because it uses delete (and not delete[]) to delete its pointer.

So there is no use for pointer arithmetic here.

If you need an array of objects, the usual advice is to use a std::vector instead.