counting consecutive null characters

[monarch_dodra]

I suppose for forward iterators you're stuck looking at everything anyway, so you may as well do a simpler algorithm. Bidirectional would depend on the relative speed of conditionals versus traversal. It's a good optimization for random access iterators though.

That's exactly how binary_search works. it does just as many iterations, but a fraction of the checks.

I was hoping to rely on distance and advance to write a common algorithm for both, but it creates a lot of problems. For instance, it is very hard to know if you have reached the end of your boundaries if you try to jump forward.