I found a particularly insightful and telling passage in the book I'm currently reading, Metaphors We Live By  by Lakoff and Johnson:

Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was "the solution of my problems" -- which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling, and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constantly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do.

...

What the chemical metaphor reveals is that our current way of dealing with problems is another kind of metaphorical activity. At present most of us deal with problems according to what we might call the puzzle metaphor, in which problems are puzzles for which, typically, there is a correct solution -- and once solved, they are solved forever. The problems are puzzles metaphor characterizes our present reality. A shift to the chemical metaphor would characterize a new reality.

Fascinating. The book has been a pleasurable journey thus far.

I'm back in Indianapolis, IN for the first time in about a year and I must say that I'm feeling quite nostalgic. Yesterday, I had my favorite Indianapolis burger at 96th St. Steakburgers. I don't know what it is that makes their burgers so delicious, but even if it was rat poison or ground up dung beetles I'd still drop $10 there every time I came to town. They're, and I mean this almost literally, to die for.

As I type, there's a thunderstorm raging outside. Despite Seattle's reputation for raininess, it doesn't get too many thunderstorms. I can count the bolts of lightning I've seen on one hand. There's nothing quite like an 80+ degree day with a severe thunderstorm thrown in to make you miss the Midwest.

Woo hoo! I finally got an invitation to Google Voice (formerly Grand Central), which means now I just have one phone number which will conveniently ring all of my phones and centralize my voice mail. I couldn't be happier. Without more delay, here is my new phone number:

1-707-PATJAK1

So excited...

This is why I don't go outside.

Shannon and I ventured out for about 20 minutes today to get various houeshold products and to ship my CyberPower UPS out for warranty repair at, coincidentally, UPS. The shipping went smoothly so we walked next door to Bartell Drugs for the household products. While we were shopping I overheard a conversation between a pharmacist or technician and a customer that went something like this:

Pharmacist: "Oh, well, I can't sell you the ones that fix that. You'll need a prescription."
Customer: "Really? I see."
Pharmacist points to the box in the customer's hand.
Pharmacist: "You can try those. It's a homeopathic remedy. It might help a little."

At this point - and this is very out of character - I interjected. Laughing, I said "Excuse me" and told the customer that he most certainly should not purchase anything homeopathic.  The pharmacist looked at me a little taken aback while I rolled my eyes and walked away.

It's outrageous to me that someone who works at a drug store would sell a consumer something that is less effective even than snake oil because she was unable to make a sale on the prescription drug. If I was a little more assertive, I would have had a discussion with the store manager. In any case, I won't be shopping at Bartell Drugs any more and I suggest that other people who understand the ridiculousness and inanity of homeopathic "cures" don't either.

Harumph. I becoming more and more like an old man every day.

I got asked this question as an interview question at the Engineering Expo at U of I and thought it was a really good interview question because it's non-trivial but a reasonable answer can be given if you just think about it for a few minutes. The humorous thing was that once the interviewer and I started talking about it, it turned out he didn't really know the answer himself - it was more intended to see how an interviewer would respond to an odd question. So what would happen?

Caveat: this is probably an incomplete answer so please feel free to correct me or add things I'm missing.

The first step is to ask "What does delete p do?" It's basically a two step operation:

1. Call p's destructor (your code)
2. Free the allocated memory for p (C++ runtime)

delete this works in exactly the same way. The first thing that happens is the destructor for your class is called - so there goes all your heap allocated memory (you don't have any memory leaks, right?). No big deal, this just means that after calling delete this you can't use any of your heap allocated memory or anything else that you clean up in your destructor.

Next, the C++ runtime frees the memory it allocated for your class. This means bye-bye for your member variables and function pointers. Interestingly, they may continue to work for a little while since their memory might not be reclaimed right away. I remember reading on Raymond Chen's blog that the Windows folks had to tweak the Windows memory manager to delay reclaiming memory for certain programs because those programs relied on just this behavior. Remember that old saying "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run"? Yeah, it's bull. In any case, this means that you can't call any member functions or access any member variables after you call delete this.

OK, so where does that leave us? Well, delete this hasn't messed with our instruction pointer (except to make the proper function calls), so your code will happily continue to run. As long as you play it safe and pretend that your class instance basically doesn't exist any more you can execute as much code as you want. This might even be handy because you now have the ability to safely commit class suicide. However, just like human suicide, it would probably be nice to leave a note for your caller in the form of a return value to let them know what happened.