Have I been needlessly verbose these many years?

[fivemack]

Suppose I have an object of some naturally-occurring reasonably fiddly C++ STL type: say

map<float,vector<map<string,pair<int,clipper::Coord_orth> > > > W;

and I want to iterate over it.

Is there any way that I can say something like typeof(W)::iterator, rather than having to write for loops whose initialiser is already wider than the screen?

for (map<float,vector<map<string,pair<int,clipper::Coord_orth> > > >::iterator Z = W.begin(); Z != W.end(); Z++)

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

typedef map<float,vector<map<string,pair<int,clipper::Coord_orth> > > > W_type;
W_type W;
// ...
W_type::iterator Z = W.begin();

[spodlife]

You make it sound so easy and obvious.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Um, is that sarcastic? Using typedefs to simplify complicated or overlong types goes back to C, never mind C++.

[spodlife]

Sorry, didn't mean to trip your sarcasm detector. Please pretend I didn't include the words "sound so".

[ewx.livejournal.com]

NP.

[fanf]

In C++0X you will be able to write

auto Z = W.begin()

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

A typedef is indeed the obvious solution. LLVM does this all the time, defining a typedef for the most commonly used iterator of a class in that class's definition and providing a method to return it, such that you can do things like this -

Module::iterator it = module->getFunctionList().begin();
while (it != module->getFunctionList().end())
{
process_function_header(it);
it++;
}