STL w/ smart pointers

["Phil Bouchard" <phil at fornux dot com>]

Greetings,

I am submitting preliminary patches required for the STL to support smart 
pointers as node pointers.  The changes aren't too important in contrast to 
the benefits we get from this.  If STL can support smart pointers thru 
"allocator::pointer" then we'll be able acheiving better abstraction and 
thus better support for algorithms such as merging, sorting, multi-indexing, 
graphing, ... of containers.

These patches are partial and offer a great example on a "std::list<>" 
instanciated using a special allocator having "allocator::pointer" as a 
smart pointer.  Furthermore I have added temporary definitions of 
"_List_node_base<_Alloc>::hook()" and "_List_node_base<_Alloc>::unhook()" in 
"list.tcc" to complete non-existant ones in libstdc++.  Last but not least I 
am assuming there is implicit conversions between a "T *" and a 
"allocator::pointer" of type "smart_ptr<T>" either with its constructor or 
with conversion operators inside the smart pointer.

As a matter of fact, we can find the entire example inside the following 
directory:
https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/shifted_ptr/

Where:
- shifted_ptr\boost\shifted_allocator.hpp: example of allocator and smart 
pointer having implicit conversions
- shifted_ptr\libs\smart_ptr\example\shifted_ptr_test2.cpp: test file (which 
compiles but doesn't run properly yet)

Obviously any help is appreciated having this ported to std::map, stack, 
vector, etc.  The changes are minimal in regards to the benefits and having 
support from Gcc's experts would help tremendously.


Regards,
-Phil

Attachment: stl_list.h.patch
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Attachment: list.tcc.patch
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