On Wed, 13 May 2009 17:17:33 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
Partition is in fact the perfect example because it works with forward
ranges. If you want to partition a singly-linked list, you'd have to
return the right-hand sublist. There's nothing else you could possibly
return! If you wanted to return the left-hand sublist, you'd have to
return a different type of range (something like "list up to this node").
It depends on if the sentinel is static.
For example, it would be perfectly legal to specify a linked list as the
nodes between node x and y, where y is null at runtime in the case of a
full list. I'm not even sure the performance would suffer significantly.
dcollections' linked list is a doubly linked list, but I use a sentinel
dummy element to denote both the beginning and the end. It makes
insertion/deletion code completely uniform because there is *always* a
valid previous and next node for each node. No checking for "if this is
the head node, update the original list pointer"
Not being able to return a subrange of a container as fundamental as a
linked list is a pretty significant oversight in my opinion.
-Steve
