memset vs fill and iterators vs pointers

From: Joe C (jkc8289_at_bellsouth.net)
Date: 08/23/04 

Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 00:31:30 -0400

I'm a hobbiest, and made the forray into c++ from non-c type languages about
a year ago. I was "cleaning up" some code I wrote to make it more "c++
like" and have a few questions. I'm comfortable using new/delete when
dealing with arrays, and, so-far haven't used the STL (eg vectors) very much
when dealing with POD. I'm using a class to dump files into. The class
puts the file data into a 32-bit array, then offers both 32-bit and char* to
the file data. The reason I've done this blasphomy is that I need to access
the file-header information from a byte-oriented viewpoint, but the actual
data is 32-bit and *will* be word-aligned with respect to the start of the
file.

first...is there a better way using streams to do the same?

second...I've been using memcopy and memset...for POD, are there compelling
reasons to use copy() and fill/fill_n() instead (when dealing with POD
arrays)?

Third...if I load a file into a 32-bit vector and the file byte length is
not an even multiple of 4-bytes...what happens to the last (incomplete) word
of the file?

I hope my questions are clear.

Joe

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