It's not particular to iterators, though. In fact, it's this way with iterators because it's already this way with pointers. Comparing invalid pointers for equality is undefined.
And the reason for that is that there is, or might be, or has been, hardware which traps upon such reads.
There's simply no use in comparing invalid pointers, especially not to themselves, so what's the point in requiring it to have a defined result?
All the buzzt!
CornedBee
"There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
- Flon's Law
I agree. You can compare an orange to itself, but once you're dealing with bananas, who cares about oranges?There's simply no use in comparing invalid pointers, especially not to themselves, so what's the point in requiring it to have a defined result?
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Not necessarily true. I may want to compare different iterators for positioning purposes for instance. Or a reverse and forward iterator on the same object.Originally Posted by dudeomanodude
I think the argument is, there's no point in comparing invalid iterators.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
