Mathias Gaunard on March 30 wrote:
Satyam Shekhar wrote:
But would it be worthwhile to modify Boost.Iterator itself and define new concepts using segmentedness as another orthogonal category, and then modify iterator_facade to support it? One of the factors influencing this would obviously be whether segmented iterators are going to be used widely in the future for other containers.
segmented iterators can also be used to iterate through recursive structures, such as trees, if I understood what I read on the subject correctly.
On a second thought (while deleting old mail...), this statement is misleading for several reasons: 1) A "normal" non-segmented iterator is perfectly able to iterate through recursive structures, such as trees. 2) A segmented iterator would be more efficient for "compile-time" recursice structures, but for "run-time" recursive structures, it would just fall back to the behavior (and efficiency) of a "normal" non-segmented iterator. 3) The "real" efficiency advantage of segmented iterators will normally come from the "inner-most" iteration, so whether a given recursive data structure will gain something by providing segmented-iterators will only depend on whether it is possible to provide a more efficient "inner-most" iteration for that data structure than without segmented iterators.