What's wrong with passing C++ iterator by reference?

Question

I\'ve written a few functions with a prototype like this:

template 
int parse_integer(input_iterator &begin, input_iterato         


        

Answer 1

In this context, I think that passing an iterator by reference is perfectly sensible, as long as it's well-documented.

It's worth noting that your approach (passing an iterator by reference to keep track of where you are when tokenizing a stream) is exactly the approach that is taken by boost::tokenizer. In particular, see the definition of the TokenizerFunction Concept. Overall, I find boost::tokenizer to be pretty well designed and well thought out.