Re: [boost] AlRangeExandrescu?

Subject: Re: [boost] AlRangeExandrescu?
From: Andrei Alexandrescu (andrei_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-07-27 13:42:54

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Mon Jul 27 2009, Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei-AT-metalanguage.com> wrote:
> 
>> David Abrahams wrote:
>>> on Fri Jul 24 2009, Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei-AT-metalanguage.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Is popFront() mutable just for efficiency? Or is there something else
>>>>> I'm missing?
>>>> It's only efficiency. I was very attracted to popFront returning the
>>>> new range (100% functional interface!) but I gave up for efficiency
>>>> reasons. I didn't want iteration with ranges to be cool and iteration
>>>> with other means to be efficient.
>>> Could you describe the efficiency problem in more detail?  I think it
>>> might be solvable.
>> Well a simple example is that a range in a contiguous array is a fat pointer,
>> e.g. (begin,end). To bump a range in-place you need to change one pointer; returning a
>> new range would have you copy two pointers. It turns out that the difference is
>> sensible for some loops.
> 
> If compilers can't optimize that overhead away, I'm disappointed in them
> ;-(
> 
> Did you check?

I did, but not the trick with the proxy.

One other source of concern was that people would write r.next() instead 
of r = r.next() (expecting that r.next modifies r in place) and then get 
confused that they got an infinite loop. In contrast, writing r = 
r.popBack() is a compile-time error because popBack returns void, so 
there's no doubt that r.popBack() is the expected way to bump a range.

Andrei