I can't beleive there are people (or at least one person) retarded enough to consider the protection of old people, women and children, and the right to decent health care to be bad things! I don't really see how it leads to (or comes from) communism. It is just a statement that the state should be there to help people living correctly. Maybe it's not the case in your country, Ed, and you're just jealous?

Actually, there is no real diference. Do whatever is clearer to you.... Any decent compiler is intelligent enough to optimise away the temporary variables. The compiler does a much better job at low-level optimisation than any programmer, I usually leave this job to it and keep the code the clearest for me. My 2 cents.. Guy :)

I'm also a Boost addict... ;) You should definitely take a look at boost::bind and boost::signal, I use them all the time. I recently started using boost::serialization and boost::regex. Both are simple to use and extremely powerful.

There is no general answer to your question. Actually, you should not even ask the question because the "if (iterator)" should not generally compile. However, in your case, the magic of typedef's probably makes it valid and equivalent to "if (pointer)". Also, the "suggestion" to do "if ( iterator == container.end() )" is NOT a suggestion: it is the only valid way to check for iterator validity. my 2 cents... Guy Prémont