In my first post on iterators, I presented a case where they work well. In this post, I’ll present a clear failure and begin discussing why the deep structure of the design leads to this failure.
more ...Iterators intrigue me because they seem to bring to C++ facilities that I’ve found congenial in other languages. I’ve spent some time in Haskell and a lot of time in Python, which both support list comprehensions. I’ve also enjoyed the limited amount of C# Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) programming that I’ve done.
Yet when I come to actually use the STL iterators, it feels awkward and requires much more text than achieving comparable results using list comprehensions or LINQ. Some of that may be simple unfamiliarity but that is itself a problem: A good design will allow me to apply patterns I’ve learned in other languages.
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