Question

When using Visual Studio, I can write a container traversal in at least the following three ways. Which way is preferable? Assuming:

vector<CString> strings1;

Method 1 (using the for_each algorithm with a lambda:

for_each(strings1.begin(), strings1.end(), [](CString s){
   _tprintf(_T("%s"), s);
}

Method 2 (using for each, in, microsoft specific):

for each(auto s in strings1)
{
   _tprintf(_T("%s"), s);
}

Method 3 (treat the vector with array syntax):

for (int i=0; i<v.size(); ++i)
{
   _tprintf(_T("%s"), v[i]);
}

I am aware that method 2 is not portable, but I don’t care about being portable. This only needs to work in Windows.

Answer 1

As Stephan T. Lavavej pointed out just a couple of days ago at the “GoingNative 2012” conference, the “official” range-based for loop will be part of the soon-to-be-released beta version of the new Visual Studio. So this will be the way to go:

for(auto s : strings1)
{
   _tprintf(_T("%s"), s);
}

or use a reference to reduce copying effort for the by-value use:

for (auto &s : strings1)  ....

Edit: the GoingNative talk mentioned above can be found here