Hmmm - now this is very interesting to me. To me, the syntax below is very obvious and transparent - even elegant. In fact, its the feature I like most about the whole proposal. It lets me compose iterators at compile time with mininal runtime cost. It also permits composition at compile time in what I see is a natural manner typedef amended::filter_iterator< from_ro_f, std::vector<employee>::const_iterator
romainians_t;
typedef amended::transform_iterator< get_empl_name_f, romainians_t
romanian_names_t;
In the serialization library it permitted me to make a set of "relatively" simple single purpose iterators like mb_from_wchar, remove_spaces, transform_width<8,6> etc and compose them in various ways to make things like from_base64, xml_escape, etc. In some cases, the input end wasn't so easy to handle. This included trnaslation from 8 bit octets to 6 bit ?, input from input iterators. I did consider the idea of ranges but didn't see it working for me here. - I don't remember the details. The extreme rigor and formality of the new boost itertator was both a curse and a blessing. Making the "dataflow" iterators seemingly harder to make. But all the compositions (some fairly deep) worked as expected with no debugging. I'm extremely interested in seeing this idea explored more in the future. "Thorsten Ottosen" <nesotto@cs.auc.dk> wrote in message news:cmrgnj$6lu$1@sea.gmane.org...
If you are going to convince me iterators are easy to use, you have to come up with something better than
typedef amended::transform_iterator< get_empl_name_f, amended::filter_iterator< from_ro_f, std::vector<employee>::const_iterator > > romanian_names_t;
std::copy( romanian_names_t(empls.begin()), romanian_names_t(empls.end()), std::ostream_iterator<std::string>(std::cout," ") );
note: I'm presuming that you have no problem with std::copy ... syntax here
Seriously, this is so ugly and hard to write that I predict less than 1% of the community will ever use it.
LOL- I think just the opposite. I guess its in the eye of the beholder. The funnest part of this is that I specifically crafted the code to permit exactly this syntax. I'm amazed there there exists even one person that has a negative reaction to it. Its immensly intriguing to me that we can have exact opposite reactions to this. I'll be curious to hear what others think. Robert Ramey