C++ iterators considered harmful?

Question

At the Boost library conference today, Andrei Alexandrescu, author of the book Modern C++ Design and the Loki C++ library, gave a talk titled \"Iterators Must Go\" (video, s

Answer 1

Isn't Andrei trying to do some hidden marketing for the D language (currently he is working with it)...?

Andrei states that containers are ok, but iterators are ugly, non-intuitive, error-prone and dangerous, hard to implement (well this last one seems to be rather true...) And what do we have in C++... pointers? Aren't they ugly/.../dangerous? But we happily embraced them and live with them.

Which one is more intuitive to write:

for(auto i=foo.begin();i!=foo.end();++i)
    bar(*i);

or

for (auto r=foo.all(); !foo.empty(); foo.popFront())
        bar(r.front());

Iterators concept can be complemented with ranges and other ideas, but I think that they have their place and won't be replaced.