Re: iterator and index

From:
"James Kanze" <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
8 Jan 2007 06:37:04 -0500
Message-ID:
<1168247115.237039.119590@i15g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Daniel K. O. wrote:

G escreveu:

And whether is "vi.end()" called when each loop happens?


Yes, it is "called" each time, as this is part of the semantics of the
for command.

And if I change the code of iterator to:

              vector<int>::iterator x=vi.end();
              for(vector<int>::iterator iter=vi.begin(); iter!=x;
++i)
 will it take less time?


Not in every (relevant) implementation I have seen so far, unless you
disable optimizations. The .end() member in containers usually consists
of a single return statement available in the header, that gets inlined
easily. Try looking at the generated assembly, and see it for yourself;
the output will be almost (when not completely) identical.


Have you actually measured it? The measurements I did (on one
particular compiler, on one particular machine) showed that it
did make a difference. Not a large difference. Not something
that I would normally worry about, unless the profiler said I
had to. But something measurably large if the loop was
otherwise trivial.

I didn't look at the assembler to determine why there was a
difference, but I suspect that because the pointer was part of
an object (the vector) which was generally accessible, the
compiler was unable to determine that it never varied, and so
re-read it from memory each pass through the loop. Where as if
the pointer is a local variable whose address is never taken,
the compiler automatically knows that it sees all modifications,
and that if it doesn't see any, it can keep the variable in
memory.

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