Question

I am working with a class that is mostly working fine, but I am doing some functionality that I might be having a recursive function return a NULLpointer of the class type as a control, and so it might be assigning a NULL pointer to my class object so long story short:

Thing& Thing::operator=(Thing * _other){
    if (_other == NULL){
        *this = NULL;        // compiler throws here
        return *this;    
    }
    // does other assignment work
    return *this;
}

my compiler VS2010 throws that this is not an I-value. so how do I set the value to NULL, or is it even possible to set an item to NULL from inside?

EDIT: modified this to *this though for some reason now the program breaks with infinite calls to the assignment operator. no idea what is going on

Answer 1

what are the member variables of Thing class?
if you want to show that the object is somehow without value or not intialized, you would better assign fileds 0 (for integers) and null(for pointers) etc, instead of assigning “this” which is constant.