On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Bill Baxter <wbax...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I got the impression from your argument that you thought that without >> an appropriate method of overloading the increment operator, it's not >> possible to duplicate the _syntax_ of STL-style iterators. My >> response is - who cares? I don't think of iterators as "pointers that >> can be incremented," and I doubt anyone who doesn't have a C++ >> background thinks of them that way either. It seems that the >> semantics of STL iterators can be implemented with methods just as >> well. > > There is a little something nice about being able to use a pointer and > iterator interchangeably for templated container algorithms. You lose > that if ++iter can't be used to iterate your iterator.
Except that in D, you rarely use pointers, and ++ isn't defined on arrays. So you lose a lot of the unity that the syntax affords you in C++.