stdlist

Note: This is not a question whether I should "use list or deque". It's a question about the validity of iterators in the face of insert() . This may be a simple question and I'm just too dense to see the right way to do this. I'm implementing (for better or worse) a network traffic buffer as a std::list<char> buf , and I'm maintaining my current read position as an iterator readpos . When I add data, I do something like buf.insert(buf.end(), newdata.begin(), newdata.end()); My question is now, how do I keep the readpos iterator valid? If it points to the middle of the old buf , then it should

Tested on Mac OS X using XCode 4.6. This example code shows removing the last element of an std::list works as I expected: an iterator reference to list::end() is still "1 past the end" and is still valid, even through removal of the last element . But the second example counters my intuition. Removing the first element of the list changes list::rend() , which I thought was "1 past the beginning". Was my expectation wrong? Why was it wrong? Why does your reference to "1 past the end" through deletion of the last element remain valid (should it not?), but a reference to "1 in front of the