On Nov 16, 2007 2:17 PM, v2cechura <v2cechura@atlas.cz> wrote:

[-- I crosspost this message to Boost Users List by mistake yesterday --]

I would like to suggest adding functions (template functions?) that would return "begin" and "end" iterators for given path. I think that it's clearer to see:

for_each(directory_begin( dir_path ), directory_end(), do_something());

than:

for_each(directory_iterator( dir_path ), directory_iterator(), do_somethig());

The functions directory_begin()/directory_end() would mimic the convenient container.begin()/container.end() functions used in STL. I know that it's merely a decoration but so is std::make_pair.

Not really. make_pair makes it possible not to specify the template arguments for std::pair. It is not really just a decoration. In this case, IMHO directory_{begin,end} do not add much to basic_directory_iterator, as directory_iterator is a good default and doesn't have template parameters to be deduced. In fact the functions you proposed:

... template <class Path> inline class basic_directory_iterator<Path> directory_end() { return basic_directory_iterator<Path>(); }

wouldn't work in your example, because you would need to specify the Path template argument for directory_end. On the other hand, if directory_iterator was a valid range, you could do std::for_each(boost::begin(directory_iterator(dir_path)), boost::end(directory_iterator(dir_path), ...); which would be *very* useful to leverage generic range based algorithms. HTH, gpd