create binary counter example

[justinmeiners]

fix #48 for @aharrison24

[aharrison24]

Looks good!

Making binary_counter::counter public for testing is understandable, but I wonder whether there's a cleaner way round the debugging requirement. You could consider providing cbegin and cend methods on binary_counter (returning const_iterator) to allow callers to iterate over the elements directly. i.e. counter.cbegin() rather than the uglier counter.counter.begin().

show_counter is essentially a std::copy into a std::ostream_iterator<char>(std::cout, " "). You could call std::copy directly from main and avoid needing to write the show_counter function. On the other hand, having the function raises the level of abstraction in main. And if you were going to replace the loop in the function with a std::copy then you'd need to start using std::iterator_traits<I>::value_type to deduce the underlying element type. On balance I suspect the raw for-loop in a function (as you have it) is cleaner!

[aharrison24]

Sorry, should have said that this is a really good example of how the binary counter should be used and what it does internally. Would have helped me a lot in my early understanding. Thank you!

[justinmeiners]

public.

I agree it's not great. I was trying to avoid making any modifications to the code, but I think mine is worse since Alex explicitly mentions it being private. I have added begin/end (I believe the cbegin/cend convention is C++11?).

std::copy

I like this better, and chose to remove the function and make it inline.