The original rationale for deprecating memcpy makes sense, but I don't see

any connection to sgetn. Memcpy takes two buffers, sgetn just one. basic_streambuf::sgetn, like, basic_istream::read, is exactly analogous to

fread from stdio.h, which AFAICT has not been deprecated.

Sgetn/bi::read have two different kinds of things to deal with - items read from the stream, and items written to the output buffers. Not exactly the same as memcpy, but related. We actually did consider doing the same to fread, but this change never made it into one of the shipping betas.

Would you mind giving a quick description of how to mark an iterator as checked, or posting a url?

This doc describes use of the checked iterators we have defined: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/y9ww7c1a(en-us,vs.80).aspx Are you looking to take your existing iterators and mark them as checked? Martyn Lovell Development Lead Visual C++ Libraries