[boost] function based associative generator

From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-23 00:44:28

Hi Everyone,

I've recently been playing around with a relatively simple idea:
creating a generic associative generator.

For some background, here's a simple problem (which is quite common in
mathematics):

I want to be able to pull out the nth fibonacci number in the
fibonacci sequence. To do this, the traditional implementation in C++
would be to create a function that yields the nth fibonacci number.
This seems fine, because as C++ programmers we would be used to the
notion of using functions. However, the traditional notion of a
sequence in mathematics is a collection of values that can be indexed
by a subscript. Consider:

struct fibonacci {
  int operator () (int n) const {
    // ...
  };
};

boost::generator<int, int> const & fib = boost::generator<int,
int>(fibonacci());
std::cout << fib[1] << std::endl; // prints 1st fibonacci number
std::cout << fib[2] << std::endl; // prints 2nd fibonacci number
...

Now consider that you want to deal with the generator using an STL algorithm:

std::copy(fib.begin(), fib.end(), ostream_iterator<int>(std::cout, "
")); // prints the infinite sequence

The iterator implementation requires that the InputType (in this case,
the second 'int' template parameter to the generator) be default
constructable and has a defined prefix and/or postfix increment
operator. The iterator models an InputIterator.

Given this, I've attached the implementation which I'm opening up for
comments. If there is interest in this utility, I'm willing to write
documentation and submit it for a formal review.

The basic idea for this utility is to map a non-void unary function to
a generator interface that provides an associative index operator
(operator[]) which passes the sole argument as the argument to the
wrapped function. This utility requires only the Boost.Function
library, and has been tested with MSVC 2008 Express Edition.

Have a good one, and I hope this helps!

-- 
Dean Michael C. Berris
Software Engineer, Friendster, Inc.