Dan Sugalski writes:Once we decide how to *get* these things (see the previous e-mail) we need to decide how they should work. We can fiddle around, but honestly the scheme:
1) They act as arrays--if you want the 18th element in the iterator, access it directly 2) They have 'next', 'previous', 'first', 'last', and 'reset' methods to get the next, previous, first, or last element in the iterator, or to reset the iterator to the beginning. Next, last, and reset change the internal current element pointer, first and last don't.
Why not take a page from C++ and call "previous" and "next" C<inc> and C<dec>, and then C<deref> to get what it points to.
Because ++ and -- affect the value not the container. (There are days when I think "C++ does it like..." is the near-perfect argument against doing it one particular way... :) Next and previous are actions on the container.
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Dan
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Dan Sugalski even samurai
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