Re: [boost] On Iteration

Subject: Re: [boost] On Iteration
From: James Porter (porterj_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-10 23:04:13

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> My article with a draft name "Iterators Must Go (Ahead)" is now 
> published on InformIt and mentioned on reddit.com. Due to the vagaries 
> of posting time and reddit dynamics, the article didn't stay long on 
> reddit's programming page so it got very few views and comments.

Having considered this problem myself, I went down a slightly different 
path. I was never really comfortable with the idea of "find" and friends 
returning a range when conceptually, what you're asking for is a location.

My solution to that was to introduce a "referent" type that works like a 
MyType * const (more-or-less). Instead of having something like "Until", 
I take the referent and use it to split the range into two subranges and 
then take the piece I care about. Obviously, this has some of the same 
safety concerns that iterators do, but I'm not sure if it's worth 
worrying about in practice (especially since there are plenty of ways of 
invalidating a range to begin with).

Still, ranges are pretty useful, and having played around with 
implementing them, they definitely make it easier to write functions 
like zip or cartesian_product.

- Jim