Reference Class Members

• This is a little out of order, but it is useful here.
• I want to have a toss the ball game.
  • You know, kids stand in a circle.
  • They toss the ball to each other.
  • Each can toss in a unique way.
• I built a hierarchy of tossing methods.
• I built an array of players.
• But I have a problem.
  • My players need access to the array, at least for the array size.
  • I might want to make a "pass to friend one of my friends" player and I would need the ability to find their friends.
• This is a problem I always have with board games.
  • The board probably holds the pieces.
  • But the pieces need access to the board.
• I really don't want to pass the board to all of the pieces all of the time.
• I could create a singleton, much like the message logger we discussed before.
• But I have another solution available as well.
• I will declare a reference data member
  • See page 317.
• Remember references
  • On first assignment, a pointer is copied.
  • This must be done at creation time.
  • After this, the pointer is always dereferenced.
• This sounds like a place for a ctor-initializer.
• Take a look at PlayerT.h in the game code.