What is the purpose of STL iterators? Why have programmers created this concept at all?
What is the purpose of STL iterators? Why have programmers created this concept at
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What is the purpose of STL iterators? Why have programmers created this concept at all?
Iterators allow you to separate algorithms from the container. As long as you have a start and end iterator, and know the capabilities of the iterator (random access etc) you can do operations on the range specified by the iterators. For example, see
std::for_each,std::transform. This way you can implement just one version of an algorithm rather than needing to write a new one for each container on which you wish it to operate.