Item 6. Temporary Objects

Difficulty: 5

Unnecessary and/or temporary objects are frequent culprits that can throw all your hard work—and your program's performance—right out the window. How can you spot them and avoid them?

("Temporary objects?" you might be wondering. "That's more of an optimization thing. What's that got to do with generic programming and the standard library?" Bear with me; the reason will become clear in the following Item.)

You are doing a code review. A programmer has written the following function, which uses unnecessary temporary objects in at least three places. How many can you identify, and how should the programmer fix them?

string FindAddr( list<Employee> emps, string name ) 
{
  for( list<Employee>::iterator i = emps.begin();
       i != emps.end();
       i++ )
  {
    if( *i == name )
    {
      return i->addr;
    }
  }
  return "";
}

Do not change the operational semantics of this function, even though they could be improved.