What we need is a generic range adaptor that can make a container of containers look like a "flat" sequence.
I suggest the syntax
rngOfContainers | boost::adaptors::flattened
and the underlying iterator should be up to bidirectional (if the underlying two container types support it).
Anyone interested in implementing this?
I've been interested in implementing something similar for a while. I was thinking slightly more generally that any n-dimensional structure can often be linearised or projected into a linear sequence. Hence this would enable not just the above example to work, but many standard algorithms could work with tree structures, hyper-cube trees, directed acyclic graphs etc. I've implemented a number of these already, but wanted to gain experience with them in my own projects before committing them to the trunk.
-Thorsten
Regards, Neil Groves