[Note: this is a reply to Thorsten's post, which hasn't shown up on my newsreader yet. I've been missing a lot ot messages lately -- is this happening to anyone else?]
"Thorsten Ottosen" <nesotto@cs.auc.dk> writes:
Dear All,
In the pre-redmond mailing Walter Brown discusses the possibility of adding these members to standard container classes:
const_iterator cbegin(); const_iterator cend(); const_reverse_iterator crbegin(); const_reverse_iterator crbegin();
The motiviation is that we want to be able to say explicitly "give me a const iterator" without doing ugly casts. IMO a sound idea.
Given the framework in boost.range these would be absolutely *trivial* to add.
1st vote: for or against adding these?
2nd vote: which naming scheme to use:
a: cbegin(), cr_begin()
b: const_begin(); const_rbegin();
The motivation for chosing the latter could be that "cr" contracttions become harder to read.
Let me know what ya think.
I faced this problem with the memory-mapped file implementation in iostreams, since whether the underlying file is open in read-only mode has absolutely nothing to do with whether the mapped_file object is const. I chose 'const_begin' and 'const_end' because these names - sound very natural to me - are not too verbose - make the sematics obvious. Best Regards, Jonathan