Re: [Boost-users] [range] begin()/end() for zero terminated strings

From: Pavol Droba (droba_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-19 03:52:26

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Wed Jun 18 2008, Raider <sraider-AT-yandex.ru> wrote:
> 
>> Can anyone tell why boost 1.35 dropped support of boost::begin()/end()
>> for zero terminated strings (const char*/wchar_t*)?
> 
> Because it was evil in generic code.  An array of char was interpreted
> as being as long as the initial sequence of nonzero elements, but an
> array of anything else was interpreted as being as long as the array.
> 
> You might ask why we didn't make it so that char(&)[N] was interpreted
> as an array of length N but char* was interpreted as a null-terminated
> string that only has forward iterators (to avoid O(N) "random access"
> operations, which are also evil in generic code)... I'm not entirely
> sure of the answer to that.
> 

Actually, the support was not dropped altogether. It was just made explicit
instead of implicit. You need to use as_literal/as_array helpers if you want
to dealy with char*/char[]/wchar_t*/wchar_t[] as ranges.

Best Ragards,
Pavol