On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Oswin Krause <Oswin.Krause@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
Hi Everybody,

I'm trying to implement a proxy_iterator for ublas::matrix which should
behave as an iterator over the matrix rows.

My "obvious" solution does not seem to work:

typedef boost::numeric::ublas::matrix<double> Matrix;
typedef boost::numeric::ublas::matrix_row<Matrix> MatrixRow;
typedef boost::numeric::ublas::vector<double> Vector;

struct MatrixIterator:
public boost::iterator_facade<
   MatrixIterator,
   Vector,//the semantic value type is a Vector
   boost::random_access_traversal_tag,
   MatrixRow//reference is a row of a matrix
>{
//snip constructors
private:
   friend class boost::iterator_core_access;

   //snip iterating stuff

   //fun part
   MatrixRow dereference() const {
       return row(*m_matrix,m_element);
   }
   std::size_t m_element;
   Matrix* m_matrix;
};

which reuslts in an error that MatrixRow can't be implicitely casted to
Vector. Which is correct. At the moment I'm using a 90% hacked workaround
which changes the ValueType of the Iterator to MatrixRow. This seems to
work as long as I don't use algorithms which rely on the actual value_type
of the iterator (for example iter_swap as implemented in the gnu libstdc++
will fail miserably even though a correct swap is implemented for the
MatrixRow...different story )

Since I need std::random_shuffle I am out of luck. I tried to find the
actual requirements of iterator_facade with respect to
ValueType/ReferenceType in the documentation, but was not able to find
them.
Does someone now a solution to this problem which works and results in an
iterator which can safely be used in random_shuffle? Or can point me to
the correct requirements?

See, for example,

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_48_0/libs/iterator/doc/ReadableIterator.html

which states that, for a ReadableIterator i, *i must have a type convertible to the iterator's value_type. Further, for iterator_facade, the type of *i is the iterator's reference type. Therefore, reference must be convertible to value_type.

Proxy references are perfectly fine, you just have to ensure they interoperate well with (i.e., are convertible to) the iterator's value_type.

HTH,

- Jeff