Surely alextgordon's point was that defining a solution in terms of a class where a function was more appropriate was bad, not that use of existing abstract types is to be avoided.

There's nothing inherently wrong with classes. I use classes occasionally. But if you don't need to use one for everything. C++ isn't Java.

a struct ;-) ... http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/std/utility/pair/

I was waiting for that! :-P