On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 6:30 AM, Jeffrey Lee Hellrung, Jr. <jeffrey.hellrung@gmail.com> wrote:
How is this different from (say) contiguous_range< char > / contiguous_range< char const > ? I can imagine a contiguous_range<T> that wraps a pair of T*s, which would seem to be a simple generalization of your proposed string_ref.
Does contiguous_range exist? On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 7:27 AM, Antony Polukhin <antoshkka@gmail.com> wrote:
1. This class is essentially just an iterator_ range<char*> (modulo template for const/wchar_t), so it should either inherit from it or have corresponding converting ctors/operators. In this sense Olaf/Gennadiy's remarks are pretty valid. OTOH size is needed very frequently and having it precomputed is a good thing, so conversion
Size is cheap to calculate, it's not worth storing it. Standardizing the layout of this type might be good too for ABI stability and maybe interoperability.
approach seems to be better (but then we lose passing by reference as iterator_range, type_traits etc). I'm not sure what's more important.
+1 for having corresponding explicit converting ctors/operators.
Shouldn't they be implicit? void f(str_ref); string s = "Olaf"; f(s); You don't want to have to wrap all those arguments in an explicit constructor.
2. Given the above, the name is misleading as it's not a reference to std::string. We use name char_range.
Better then other names, but at first glance it is not clear, that char_range can be used as string.
I went for str_ref. It's a bit shorter and the link to string is a bit weaker. There's also mutable_str_ref for non-const char and data_ref for and mutable_data_ref for unsigned char. -- Olaf