Question

I posted earlier today about template classes, but was pretty far off and got a solution to my previous problem from here. Of course when that’s dealt with, there’s always a new one that I can’t seem to figure out.

Given the following constructor:

template <typename Type, int inSize>
sortedVector<Type, inSize>::sortedVector():
    size(inSize), vector(new Type[inSize]), amountElements(0)
{}

I want to make a dynamic array, which I then can insert elements of whatever type into via an add-method. The calls from main will look as follows:

sortedVector<Polygon, 10> polygons;
sortedVector<int, 6> ints;

How can I initialize the array to zero when it’s constructed? I can not set an object to zero 😉

I thought I was being smart and tried to overload the =-operator for Polygon and given an int it would do nothing. Turns out I can not do that ):

Any good suggestions?

Also, here’s the template class sortedVector:

template <typename Type, int inSize>
class sortedVector
{
public:
    sortedVector();
    int getSize();
    int getAmountElements()
    bool add(const Type &element);

private:
    Type *vector;
    int size;
    int amountElements;
};

and just in case also Polygon:

class Polygon
{
public:
    Polygon();
    Polygon(Vertex inVertArr[], int inAmountVertices);
    ~Polygon();
    void add(Vertex newVer);
    double area();
    int minx();
    int maxx();
    int miny();
    int maxy();
    int getAmountVertices() const;        
    friend bool operator > (const Polygon &operand1, const Polygon &operand2);
    friend bool operator < (const Polygon &operand1, const Polygon &operand2);

private:
    Vertex *Poly;
    int amountVertices;
};

Answer 1

Initialize the array elements to Type(). This is what the standard library containers do. For built-in numeric types, Type() is equivalent to 0. For class/struct types, Type() constructs a temporary default-constructed object.