On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Daniel James <dnljms@gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 November 2012 11:56, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev@gmail.com> wrote:
The problem with std::string is the same as with string_ref - it doesn't support implicit construction from an arbitrary range, so my examples with custom string types would still not work.
Shouldn't construction from an arbitrary range be explicit? Arbitrary implicit conversions are problematic. To get implicit construction from third party strings, I'd use some sort of explicit customisation mechanism.
If the string_ref or range type (let's call it contiguous_range< const char* >) is not implicitly convertible from other string types then it is useless for use cases I pointed out. The thing is to make interfaces transparently support any string types. As a side note, I wonder if it should be contiguous_range< const char*
or contiguous_range< const char >? Since the range is contiguous, we can always store pointers internally, even if the referred range has other iterator types (e.g. std::vector).