On 09/18/2014 02:52 PM, seany wrote:
what if i needed to access many such runtime variables of many types, and did not want to create a member for each type?
If you are holding an address in a void*, you must make sure that the original object is still at that location when you attempt to access the object.
If there are limited number of such string[] arrays then you can populate an array in the beginning and pass around void* values to elements in there.
However, as soon as an element is added or removed from an array, all (or some) of the references to those elements get invalidated. (An exceptions is where the array has capacity and you add an element.)
Linked lists, trees, etc. don't have that problem: Their elements stay where they are even after elements are added to or removed from the container.
If you can, storing an index instead of a void* is a better way to go. Even if the elements are relocated, as long as no element is removed from the collection, an index value will always be valid.
Ali
