Boost.Range

History and Acknowledgement

The library have been under way for a long time. Dietmar Kühl originally intended to submit an array_traits class template which had most of the functionality present now, but only for arrays and standard containers.

Meanwhile work on algorithms for containers in various contexts showed the need for handling pairs of iterators, and string libraries needed special treatment of character arrays. In the end it made sense to formalize the minimal requirements of these similar concepts. And the results are the Range concepts found in this library.

The term Range was adopted because of paragraph 24.1/7 from the C++ standard:

Most of the library's algorithmic templates that operate on data structures have interfaces that use ranges. A range is a pair of iterators that designate the beginning and end of the computation. A range [i, i) is an empty range; in general, a range [i, j) refers to the elements in the data structure starting with the one pointed to by i and up to but not including the one pointed to by j. Range [i, j) is valid if and only if j is reachable from i. The result of the application of functions in the library to invalid ranges is undefined.

Special thanks goes to

Pavol Droba for help with documentation and implementation
Pavel Vozenilek for help with porting the library
Jonathan Turkanis and John Torjo for help with documentation
Hartmut Kaiser for being review manager
Jonathan Turkanis for porting the lib (as far sa possible) to vc6 and vc7.