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how portable is end iterator decrement?

Asked 2011-03-16T07:15:53.423
68

Just encountered decrement of end() iterator in my company source codes and it looks strange for me. As far as I remember this was working on some platforms, but not for the others. Maybe I'm wrong, however I couldn't find anything useful in standard about that. Standard only says that end() returns an iterator which is the past-the-end value, but is it guaranteed to be decrementable? How does code like that match the standard?

std::list<int>::iterator it = --l.end();

Thanks in advance.

c++ stl iterator portability
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2 Answers

56

I think this is the relevant clause:

ISO/IEC 14882:2003 C++ Standard 23.1.1/12 – Sequences

Table 68 lists sequence operations that are provided for some types of sequential containers but not others. An implementation shall provide these operations for all container types shown in the "container" column, and shall implement them so as to take amortized constant time.

    +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    |                                  Table 68                                  |
    +--------------+-----------------+---------------------+---------------------+
    |  expression  |   return type   |     operational     |      container      |
    |              |                 |      semantics      |                     |
    +--------------+-----------------+---------------------+---------------------+
    | a.front()    | reference;      | *a.begin()          | vector, list, deque |
    |              | const_reference |                     |                     |
    |              | for constant a  |                     |                     |
    +--------------+-----------------+---------------------+---------------------+
    | a.back()     | reference;      | *--a.end()          | vector, list, deque |
    |              | const_reference |                     |                     |
    |              | for constant a  |                     |                     |
    ..............................................................................
    .              .                 .                     .                     .
    .              .                 .                     .                     .
    ..............................................................................
    | a.pop_back() | void            | a.erase(--a.end())  | vector, list, deque |
    ......................................
answered 2011-03-16T07:32:16.067
2

This code is not OK, in case list is empty you are in trouble.

So check for that, if list is not empty the code is very fine.

answered 2011-03-16T07:30:23.607

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