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### Overview

A Range is a concept similar to the STL Container concept. A Range provides iterators for accessing a half-open range `[first,one_past_last)` of elements and provides information about the number of elements in the Range. However, a Range has fewer requirements than a Container.

The motivation for the Range concept is that there are many useful Container-like types that do not meet the full requirements of Container, and many algorithms that can be written with this reduced set of requirements. In particular, a Range does not necessarily

- own the elements that can be accessed through it,
- have copy semantics,

Because of the second requirement, a Range object must be passed by (const or non-const) reference in generic code.

The operations that can be performed on a Range is dependent on the traversal category of the underlying iterator type. Therefore the range concepts are named to reflect which traversal category its iterators support. See also terminology and style guidelines. for more information about naming of ranges.

The concepts described below specifies associated types as metafunctions and all functions as free-standing functions to allow for a layer of indirection.