At 10:02 PM -0700 6/3/02, Duane Murphy wrote:
I really love iterators. I have worked at trying to figure out the "right" way of doing a plain iterator. That is I have a "thing" that looks like a container and has APIs for "iterating" the container but those APIs dont really look like a standard iterator.
The canonical example is a file iterator; iterate over the files in a directory. The directory appears to be a container with filenames as the members of the container.
I have gone back to this example several times in the last few years. I have finally decided that this is a bad idea, because a file system directory is not really a container. The container can be changed outside the currently executing program, and there is no "container-like" semantics to tell the program that the iterators into that container are invalid. -- -- Marshall Marshall Clow Idio Software mailto:marshall@idio.com My name is Bobba Fett. You killed my father, prepare to die!