Question

I’m in a situation where I cannot use a vector because I use &element[x] then add more items so the pointer is invalidated. The problem is that std::list does not seem to overload the operator [] nor provide an at() method. Therefore the only way I see I could simulate at() is by using an iterator. Is there however a better way to do this?

Answer 1

You should reconsider your design probably.

Trying to emulate operator[] or at for std::list would lead to performance disaster: these operations would take O(N) and not O(1) time as std::list::iterator is Bidirectional iterator, not Random Access iterator. So if you now iterate through container and call[] or at for each element, it would lead to O(N*N) instead of O(N).

That’s why these operation are not provided by std::list.