"Then, I remembered I don't know how to do that, so I have to go back and fix it. Can structs even be templates? It should. structs are just classes that are public by default. I don't think you can do something along the lines of typedef btnode* btpointer, unfortunately."

ok, I think I gather what you are driving at and yes I believe it is possible. I had to do a program last year where we simulated the huffman coding algorithm and it used trees and crap like that. and one data structure combo that was especially deadly was this:

struct HuffmanPair
{
int occurences;
string AsciiCharacter;
};

templte
struct BinaryTreeNode
{
Item data;
BinaryTreeNode* left;
BinaryTreeNode* right;
};


so basically what this does is: the template is going to be a node with stores three things in it. imagine that in the middle is the "data" of type Item (any type you want) in the left is the left pointer and in the right is the right pointer. Now the "data" is going to be type HuffmanPair for my program, which is a struct of the letter and how many times that letter occurs in a word. however, the "data" could be of type int, string, or whatever makes sense. but if can also be a homemade type to make things easier to manipulate. hope this helps

Thanks. :) It's nice to know that my guess that structs and classes can both work with templates. It seems as though LJ's HTML stripper removed everything in <'s and >'s, but I get the gist of it anyway. :)

This is my one big stumbling block, which from my Google searches lead me to believe the following is not allowed in C++:
My professor likes typedefing pointers in our binary trees, linked lists, etc, like so:
typedef BinaryTreeNode* BinaryTreeNodePtr;

Any thoughts on how such a typedef could work if the BinaryTreeNode was a template, as in your example above? I tried playing around with some different syntaxes, which my compiler all hated. :)
My first guess would be something along the lines of:
typedef BinaryTreeNode* BinaryTreeNodePtr

I think google searches lead me to something saying it basically wasn't allowed because it would make the language really complex that worked. I may have misread it, though. :)

I imagine this could be achieved with a preprocessor parameterized macro, but that sounds very ugly to me. In C that would be fine, but in C++ I would find it very hard to justify such a hack.

Hah. Second code segment should read:
typedef BinaryTreeNode* <T> BinaryTreeNodePtr <T>