Why use iterators instead of array indices?

Question

Take the following two lines of code:

for (int i = 0; i < some_vector.size(); i++)
{
    //do stuff
}

And this:

for (som         


        

Answer 1

STL iterators are mostly there so that the STL algorithms like sort can be container independent.

If you just want to loop over all the entries in a vector just use the index loop style.

It is less typing and easier to parse for most humans. It would be nice if C++ had a simple foreach loop without going overboard with template magic.

for( size_t i = 0; i < some_vector.size(); ++i )
{
   T& rT = some_vector[i];
   // now do something with rT
}
'