holy crap auto is awesome

[mindstalk]

One thing easy to miss about Python is how it can easily print anything, including lists of dictionaries of lists of objects.  C++, not so much.  So I wrote a simple template function to print a vector of printable types, and then one for deques.

template<class T>
void pr_vector(const vector <T> &v) {
    for (auto i : v)
        cout << i;
    cout << "\n";
}
template<class T>
void pr_deque(const deque <T> &v) {
    for (auto i : v)
        cout << i;
    cout << "\n";
}

Well, lots of duplication there.  I tried templating on the container type too, template <class C, class T>, but the resulting C <T> didn't work; it probably should with some syntax, but I don't know what, yet.

But I figured I'd try auto:

void pr_cont(const auto &v) {
    for (auto i : v)
        cout << i;
    cout << "\n";
}

...that subsumes both templates.  And lots of others.  vector, deque, list...  Of course, the values themselves have to be printable, it can't handle a vector<pair<int, string>> because there's no printing on pairs.  But still, for C, this is amazing!