Institute of Computer Science III
University of Bonn
Databases * Information Systems * Software Engineering *
Pattern Recognition * Image Processing * Artificial Intelligence * Robotics
Reference Pointer for Class Hierarchies
In object oriented languages like C++ [ES90,Str91]
pointers are used to access dynamically allocated objects and to share objects
between two or more program parts. Objects are shared instead of copied to
reduce memory requirements and to introduce an easy way to globally change
objects, e.g. colors or other attributes.
The programmer explicitly creates the objects before they are first used and is
responsible to delete them if they are no longer needed. This is a complicated
task because the programmer has to keep track of which class instance uses
which objects and delete the objects as soon as they are no longer used. To
bypass this task, reference pointers can be used. In this paper a new design
for reference pointers is introduced that can be used instead of ordinary
pointers without visible difference but with the advantage of automatic memory
management. The new design especially considers class hierarchies.
Click here to obtain the full paper (PS, gzip, 28363 bytes, 12 pages)
webmaster@www.informatik.uni-bonn.de -
16.12.05