Meaning of .clear() for containers

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:53:59 -0500, Jesse Phillips  
<jessekphillips+D at gmail.com> wrote:

> Answering a question over on stack overflow I realized that clear() has  
> 2 meanings.
>
> TDPL says that clear should be used to free resources of the object and  
> place the object into an invalid state. That is failure can occur but  
> memory corruption is prevent, similar to null for pointer types.
>
> However for container types clear() is used to empty the container. It  
> is still valid to use the container after calling clear(), but the  
> definition from TDPL suggest that this can not be expected.

clear as a global function is for destroying a class/struct

clear as a member can do anything.  clear is not a keyword.

clear(container) -> same as delete container, but without freeing any  
memory.

container.clear() -> remove all elements

This has been brought up before as a problem, I'm not sure it's that  
terrible, but I can see why there might be confusion.

-Steve