I have been looking at the shared_ptr class, and I have made a change to include an assignment from a standard pointer. I have done this so that I don't have to create a new shared_ptr just to reassign an existing shared_ptr.
1) Is this necessary?
Necessary if you don't want to manually create a temp. ;)
2) Does this do the job?
Sure seems to.
3) Is there any reason this wasn't included in the first place?
Although I don't tend to do this, you could run into troubles if you allocate some memory, have a "bare" pointer to it, and then assign it to a parameter that is a shared pointer. If you were planning on managing the memory yourself in this case, you'd have trouble when the shared pointer went out of scope. This change wouldn't have a negative impact on *me*, but I'm certainly a babe in the Boost world myself having only sufficiently figured out the smart pointers myself. :) However, this is probably the kind of thing the authors were trying to protect against happening accidentally... -tom! -- Tom Plunket Sony Computer Entertainment America tplunket@scea.com Bend, Oregon, USA 3D Studio geek PlayStation junkie