Re: Deprecating --enable-bounds-check?

[John W. Eaton]

On 05/11/2017 01:16 PM, Rik wrote:

> > It seems reasonable to me.  We could make xelem, elem, and () all do the
> > same thing, and deprecate xelem (and possibly elem, or is there an
> > advantage to having both operator and member function forms?).

Oops, I started looking at this and realized that I completely forgot 
about the other difference between xelem and elem:  elem checks the 
reference count.

We could still eliminate bounds checking by doing the following:

    deprecating checkelem
    removing the conditional call to it in ()
    replacing the elem method with () everywhere

Then, separately, we could decide to eliminate xelem.  If we eliminate 
it, then all uses can be replaced by using the data method to get a 
pointer to the underlying data vector then and indexing that directly 
with "[]".  Doing that is probably better than using xelem anyway, 
because it forces you to think about whether the object is const and/or 
whether you want to make the representation unique instead of just 
ignoring the reference count completely.

What do you think?

Either way, I can go ahead and do the first part now.

jwe