On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 3:20 PM, Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
One of my blink reactions is that array_ref<T> and basic_string_ref<charT, traits> are range generators and I was a bit surprised to see the implementation was a pointer and length rather than two pointers. Or better yet, two iterators or an explicit range component. With iterators, a basic_string_ref could do encoding conversions on-the-fly without need of temporary strings. But I have no idea if that is workable or actually is better.
What do other Boosters think?
I think the idea is great. In fact, I've written similiar classes: http://code.google.com/p/xbt/source/browse/trunk/xbt/misc/xbt/data_ref.h I've posted about the idea on this list before, but received few responses. The idea is that you've got a non-template function that takes an array. Often types used are (const void*, size_t) or (const char*, size_t), which is cumbersome. Iterators instead of pointers wouldn't really work. std::string with small string optimizations is sub-optimal if input is not an std::string, but for example std::array. N3334 does not really address the (const void*, size_t) case. BTW, isn't there a forum / mailing list to discuss these proposals? Olaf