but that fails as soon as you have a case where you want to pass an algorithm implementation that does have state. That was my point - whenever I assumed that I

but that fails as soon as you have a case where you want to pass an algorithm implementation that does have state. That was my point - whenever I assumed that I would not have state... well I ended up needing to refactor everything because I ended up needing to add a new strategy that did require some state later. In the context of C++, struct / class types are more generic that function pointers and there's no real shortcut around this - that's how the language is specified.