Re: Use of CString key in CMap
"David Ching" <dc@remove-this.dcsoft.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:HlSJj.200$CW.144@newssvr11.news.prodigy.net...
I object to std::map::find() returning an iterator; it's not as clean as a
simple bool.
I agree with you about std::map::find.
I would prefer code like:
if ( ! myMap.find( key ) )
...
instead of :
if ( myMap.find( key ) == myMap::end )
...
... iterator == map::end
... means: "no element found"
The find-returning-boolean is more intuitive and clearer to read.
I recall that I wrote a simple custom template "map" class (calling it
Dictionary) just wrapping std::map, and using coding conventions like
PascalCasing (that I prefer to underscore_casing ) and I added some methods
like a substitute for "find", returning a bool (I called it ContainsKey).
The implementation is trivial, of course (just kind of a little wrapper to
some of std::map methods), but it helped me building code of a quality I
prefer.
STL does the job, but really, the only people that seem to like it are
cross platform people. Dedicated Windows programmers think differently,
in general. Or maybe that's just me.
For me, the very good point of STL is its container composibility. e.g. you
can build maps storing string-arrays or other objects, and it all works well
in STL. And STL containers work well also with "external" classes like
CString (which is not part of STL). From this particular point of view, STL
seems to me very well designed, IMHO.
Moreoever, the iterators help you to strongly decouple the containers and
the algorithms, i.e. thanks to the iterators, you can implement (or use)
some generic algorithms, without knowing the details of the container type
storing the data. It's kind of programming towards an "interface" instead of
a "concrete" class.
However, some STL things could be made better, like your good point about
std::map::find (...and frankly speaking I don't like the
stl_naming_convention with underscores... but it's just my personal coding
"tastes" :)
Cheers,
G