List Class Replacement (Begin)

The List class was the first implemented for this project, so it is fitting that it will be the first to be replaced with the transition to Qt.  Qt's list class is named QList.  The functionality is not much different then the home grown List class, though most of the member functions have different names.

The approach being used was to first replace all cases of List with QList and then search for each List class member function name and replace it with QList's version.  In some cases, the code needs to be written a bit since the QList functionality is slightly different.  For example, while QList also has a first() function, it must not be called if the list is empty (must check if it is empty first), while the List class first() function allows for an empty list (returning a null pointer).

The first complication came in how to deallocate items in the QList.  The question was, does this happen automatically when leaving scope, is deleted or via QList's clear() member function.  Neither was the case where the list is a list of pointers to allocated elements.  Each element needs to be deleted (same as the case with the List class).

A small test program was written to evaluate and confirm this behavior.  As part of this evaluation,  a method to detect memory leaks was employed that is kind of built into QtCreator (at least on Linux).  This lead to quite a few detours, which will be the subject of the posts that follow...