Ben Hutchings wrote:
Jim Lear wrote:
I'm just a newbie
who wants to sequence through my map, really. I don't want to be forced to understand iterators, adapters, iterator-independence, and generic programing paradigms to do so. :-)
<snip>
I'm afraid you're going to have to understand at least something about iterators and generic programming to be able to make use of the standard library.
I'm beggining to understand that, thanks to everyone's help. These concepts, while superior to the standard programming paradigm, are heavy pre-requisites for programmers to learn (especially old school dummies like yours truly). These prerequisites may be large impedements for people to adopt STL. I still cling to the notion that something like the container[iterator] concept should be included, and bad old-style programming should be accomodated, as long as they're accompanied by lots of footnotes explaining that using such concepts will make one's code container-dependent. This would allow people to write useful (albeit bad) STL code quickly, while warning signs point the way to generic programming. But since I've had my generic programming lesson (directly from the experts, no less), I'll embrace the iterator concept and hope that everyone forgets that I ever suggested anything so silly as container[iterator]. :-) Grumble grumble... I always disliked pointer methods for accessing arrays in C... grumble grumble... :-) -- Jim Lear