[Home]STLAlgorithmExtensions/OnEach

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Citing Jaakko Järvi and Gary Powell from their documentation about The Boost Lambda Library:

Strictly taken, the C++ standard defines for_each as a non-modifying sequence operation, and the function object passed to for_each should not modify its argument. The requirements for the arguments of for_each are unnecessary strict, since as long as the iterators are mutable, for_each accepts a function object that can have side-effects on their argument. Nevertheless, it is straightforward to provide another function template with the functionality of std::for_each but more fine-grained requirements for its arguments.

Thus, using lambda library facilities with for_each becomes virtually illegal given the fact that much of the usefulness comes with the possibility to actually change the elements of the sequence provided to for_each. I also think that the comment by Järvi and Powell about what for_each accepts could be misleading, because some STL implementation could decide to enforce the fact that for_each is a non-mutating algorithm thus preventing us from using it as a mutating one (and changing STL platform doesn't seem a good idea in this case, but this is a personal opinion).

Thus, it could be useful to have another algorithm, which we could call on_each, implemented in the most straighforward way:

//Performs f() on any element elem in [first, pastlast)
template<typename InputIterator, typename UnaryFunction>
UnaryFunction on_each(InputIterator first, InputIterator pastlast, 
                          UnaryFunction f) {
   for (; first != pastlast; ++first)
      f(*first);
   return f;
}

in order to:

Maybe, the definition of for_each should be revised as well with more fine-grained requirements for its arguments, but I'm wondering how much code relies on its side effects now and how tough would be adjust all the uses :)


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Last edited August 22, 2005 4:42 am (diff)
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