"Pavol Droba" <droba@topmail.sk> wrote in message news:20041004094558.GX9207@lenin.felcer.sk... | > | This would allow to easily (and naturaly) write most of the 'safe' | > | algorithms. | > | > are you suggesting to rewrite all the mutable standard algorithms? | | I'm not sure where are you heading? We are talking about sorts and | and permutations. There are not so many of them. If they are provided | as member functions, these would be one-line long. So it yeilds | about 20-30 lines of code all together. hm...we have at least swap_ranges() ramdom_shuffle() sort*() stable_sort*() partial_sort*() nth_element*() push_heap*() pop_heap*() prev_permutation*() next_premutation*() | Other mutating algorithms are not usable anyway. | | swap functionality would enable to write other 'safe' algorithms. then maybe we need another iterator category, say, swap_only_iterator_category, and algorithms for it? Anway, I don't feel implementing algorithms just for smart containers to be a very good generic abstraction. | > | | > | > 3. we risk users will just do &*begin(), &*end() to get the pointers | > anyway | > | > | > | | > | If somebody would do this, it is more then clear, that there is a great | > | potential | > | for something to get wrong, unlike when you write | > | | > | std::remove(vec.ptr_begin(), vec.ptr_end(), ...) | > | | > | which seems very reasonable. | > | > not if you know what remove does.. | > | > std::remove( vec.begin(). vec.end() ) | > | > will either fail at compile time or do it right. | > | | Are you sure about this? 1. this won't compile if the algorithm requires T to be copyable 2. if T is copyable, we need not worry about anything other than it could be slow | The knowledge about remove algorithm is far not enough | to comprehend how it would work in conjuction with ptr_iterator. It won't work properly with ptr_iterator, that's how it is currently There is AFAICT lots of places where you can go wrong in STL and C++ and this situation does not seem particularly nasty to me. "Trust the programmer" as the old C++ matra goes. br Thorsten