Well, that's a very clever idea. It subverts the purpose of boost/detail/iterator.hpp which was intended to be not much more than a wrapper for std::iterator_traits to work around compiler/library implementation deficiencies, but something like that just might work. That said, the reference type is definitely wrong in your specialization; it should be the same as the type returned by dereferencing the back_insert_iterator (I think that might be the back_insert_iterator type itself, IIRC).
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Well, the *really* right way to go about it is to write a fix that's not specific to back_insert_iterator, but that works for all kinds of output iterators that are not also forward iterators. That would take a little thought to get right, but it would be a good project for you to take on.
Thanks for the catching the reference error. I did manage to get this working, but only for back_insert_iterators. I did run into a few troubles in the iterator_facade.hpp file. It seems that back_insert_iterator doesn't offer a const dereference operator member, and this caused issues in the dereference_iterator functor. Changing it to cast away the const of the iterator made everything work as expected. I don't like this solution, as it potentially breaks a const contract for so many other use-cases. I went back and changed it to only cast away the const if it had the output_iterator_tag. This is slightly better in my opinion as I don't see much use in a const output iterator. It still doesn't sit well with me. Maybe after I'm less distracted by my day job, I can figure out a better approach. I'm open to suggestions :) . I'll also look into doing this generically, though I believe I'll just get into enumerating the major output iterators (e.g. container inserter, stream inserter, ...). Here's the modified dereference_iterator functor. Feel free to rip into it: struct dereference_iterator { template<typename Iterator> struct apply { typedef typename iterator_traits<Iterator>::reference type; }; template<typename Iterator> typename apply<Iterator>::type operator()(Iterator const& it) { typename iterator_traits<Iterator>::iterator_category category; return dereference_dispatch(it, category); } template<typename Iterator, typename IteratorCategory> typename apply<Iterator>::type dereference_dispatch(Iterator const& it, IteratorCategory) { return *it; } template<typename Iterator> typename apply<Iterator>::type dereference_dispatch(Iterator const& it, std::output_iterator_tag) { return *const_cast<Iterator&>(it); } }; Cheers, Kris