STL container assignment and const pointers

Question

This compiles:

int* p1;
const int* p2;
p2 = p1;

This does not:

vector v1;
vector v2;
v2 = v1;         


        

Answer 1

Direct assignment is not possible. As others explained, the equivalence is not established by the pointer types, but by the container types. In this case, vector doesn't want to accept another vector that has a different, but compatible element type.

No real problem, since you can use the assign member function:

v2.assign(v1.begin(), v1.end());