"Eric Niebler" <eric@boost-consulting.com> writes:
David Abrahams wrote:
"Eric Niebler" <eric@boost-consulting.com> writes:
For all but the most trivial loops, the cost of reading and writing a bool is lost in the noise. IMO, being able have reference loop variables is worth the very small price. "There's gotta be a better way" ;-)
There isn't, and it's easy to see why. If you want to support reference loop variables, you need to be able to rebind the reference at each iteration. References aren't rebindable, so you need a declaration. In C++, there is only one way to declare a varible, inject it into a subsequent scope and *not* evaluate it in boolean context: the for loop. Hence, the inner for loop is necessary, as is a mechanism for executing the loop only once and for handling break statements.
That isn't enough to convince me that a boolean is needed, yet. Maybe something could be done with "goto"? I haven't looked at BOOST_FOREACH carefully, but I'm imagining something like: for (C::iterator s = c.begin(), f = c.end(); s != f; ++s) // outer { for(C::reference r = *s;;) // inner { // Body goes here goto continue_; } break; // if there's a break in the body, break out all the way continue_: } Not sure if you can generate those labels reliably, but it seems possible as long as nobody wants to put two FOREACHes on a single line. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com