Re: [boost] [string] proposal

Subject: Re: [boost] [string] proposal
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-21 12:51:20

At Sat, 22 Jan 2011 01:14:38 +0800,
Dean Michael Berris wrote:
> 
> >> 4. Looks like a real STL container except the iterator type is smarter
> >> than your average iterator.
> >>
> >> Encoding is a matter of external interpretation and I think should not
> >> be part of a string's interface. You can have wrappers that interpret
> >> a string as a UTF-* string.
> >
> > What does it iterate over? Â chars? Â code points? Â characters?
> > Something else?
> 
> I can see basically a way of saying what you want when you want to get
> an iterator from it -- by default though a call to '.begin()' will
> return an iterator characters (just so you don't break compatibility
> with std::string).

Then you mean an iterator over chars, not characters.

> The iterator can store a reference to the original string and when
> advanced, can do the appropriate interpretation of the string in
> context. If you wanted a code point iterator, you'd get the code point
> iterator. If you wanted a character based on a certain encoding then
> you can have a special iterator for that. An iterator would also know
> whether it was out of bounds.
> 
> This allows people to write code that dealt with code points,
> characters (based on the encoding), and raw data if absolutely
> necessary.

Hmm, I'm just not sure whether these are useful.  The iterators to be
supplied (if any) should IMO be dictated by the needs of real
algorithms.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com