Olaf wrote on Friday, October 21, 2011 at 0:34:29:
On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 8:15 PM, pavel <paul.cpprules@gmail.com> wrote:
sorry, i misread the initial message
if the definition of size is how many times one need to ++begin to reach end then it's clearly must be something like size_t
but if size is (end - begin) for random access iterators it well may be a signed integer, e.g. ptrdiff_t
Why? Are you trying to imply end - begin can be negative for a valid range?
its natural for me that the result of (rand_iter - rand_iter) is returned without type conversion, which is a signed integer so, to convert or not to convert to unsigned is then the user's responsibility but if you state that in any way size() is the number of (++begin)'s to reach end, then regardless of the implementation it may return size_t (involving type conversion in case of random access iterators) it's mere a "politics" question, a matter of definition of size() -- Pavel P.S. if you notice a grammar mistake or weird phrasing in my message please point it out