Re: [boost] Re: Re: Re: Any interest in adding unicode support to boost?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-10-20 17:30:50

At 03:46 PM 10/20/2004, Peter Dimov wrote:

 >> The iterators used are bidirectional, not random access (impossible
 >> on UTF-8 and UTF-16) and they are as of now not constant. It IS
 >> possible to assign a code unit to a UTF-8 encoded string through an
 >> iterator, even if the resulting code unit sequence would be longer
 >> than the one the iterator is pointing to. The underlying container is
 >> automatically resized to make room for the new sequence. (This is of
 >> course slow!)
 >
 >This is another basic_string mistake that effectively rules out efficient 

 >reference counting. ;-) Just make the iterators constant. The 
functionality
 >can be obtained with explicit erase/insert/replace members.

There are additional advantages to a constant iterator and explicit 
erase/insert/replace design; various caching and disk-residence 
implementations become both possible and efficient.

--Beman