Parametrize the payload type

2.2 Parametrize the payload type

Listing 2 is the second trial. This time, we use a class template to parametrize the type of the payload of a list node.

Listing 2:

Templateclasslinkedlist

1template <class T> class LinkedList
2    T payload;
3    LinkedList<T> *pNext;
4  public:
5    LinkedList<T>(void) { pNext = NULL; }
6    LinkedList<T>(const T &v):payload(v) { pNext = NULL; }
7    void setValue(const T &v) { payload = v; }
8    T getValue(void) const { return payload; }
9    void setNext(LinkedList<T> *pNode) { pNext = pNode; }
10    LinkedList<T> *getNext(void) { return pNext; }
11};

Here, we use T as a “parameter” so that we can create diﬀerent template classes by using a diﬀerent actual type for T. For example, to specify a linked list of characters, we can use LinkedList<char>, and to specify a linked list of long integers, we can use LinkedList<long int>.

Note that T is not limited only to built-in types. If we have a class called Fraction, we can have a linked list of fractions as LinkedList<Fraction>.

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