This implementation is intended as a public descendent of iterator_range moreso than a shared_array.
Ranges don't own anything. A shared_range still sounds wrong.
Dunno what more to say. It's a mashup of a shared_array and an iterator_range. The options were shared_iterator (wrong), shared_range (eh), array_iterator (wrong), and array_range (wrong). "shared_block" sounds better but "block" is tremendously ambiguous. And the concept implemented really is a range. So, "shared_range".
Where did data() go?
This is the biggest departure from your implementation and one that stems from wanting a "shared iterator_range" more than a "shared_array with a length". iterator_range has an operator= taking any
Isn't it more like a ptr_range anyway?
I don't follow this comment. Is there a ptr_range somewhere that I can neither Google nor grep? My coffee's wearing off...
ForwardRange. To have shared_range::operator= logically accomplish the same thing, I opted for it copy a ForwardRange but not to perform any shared resource ownership. In that case, the shared_array shared_range::p_ has no well-defined semantic (since nothing's managed) which makes data() (among other things) not well-defined concepts. Consequently, no data() member nor any access to the
data() would just return empty() ? NULL : &front();
You just implemented begin(). It's a range. :) - Rhys