Reason why not to have a DELETE macro for C++

Question

Are there any good reasons (except \"macros are evil\", maybe) NOT to use the following macros ?

#define DELETE( ptr ) \\
i         


        

Answer 1

Because it doesn't actually solve many problems.

In practice, most dangling pointer access problems come from the fact that another pointer to the same object exists elsewhere in the program and is later used to access the object that has been deleted.

Zeroing out one of an unknown number of pointer copies might help a bit, but usually this is a pointer that is either about to go out of scope, or set to point to a new object in any case.

From a design point of view, manually calling delete or delete[] should be relatively rare. Using objects by value instead of dynamically allocated objects where appropriatem using std::vector instead of dynamically allocated arrays and wrapping the ownership of objects that have to be dynamically allocated in an appropriate smart pointer (e.g. auto_ptr, scoped_ptr or shared_ptr) to manage their lifetime are all design approaches that make replacing delete and delete[] with a "safer" macro a comparatively low benefit approach.