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From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-01-06 13:27:32


At 01:23 PM 1/6/2001 -0500, David Abrahams wrote:

>> >1) Rename to Boost Conversion Library for compatibility with future
>> >functionality that sounds quite interesting (unless alot of people
>> >really hate this idea).
>>
>> Done.
>
>Well, I'm just one person, but I never liked this idea. What's the
>difference between conversion and casting? Well, nothing, except that
>casting is sooo much more specific. Casting deals with type conversion.
Are
>we planning on handing unit (e.g. lengths/monetary) conversion in this
same
>library? What about religious conversion ;-) ?

Well, you were outvoted, I think. Kevlin's logic carried the day, IIRC.

>Conversions are not necessarily casts, but casts are always conversions.
>A cast is an explicit conversion using an operator-based syntax (well,
>one of many, to be precise). For instance, although a popular term,
>there's no such thing as an implicit cast.
>
>So, calling a conversions library a cast library if it included non-
>cast-like functions would be a category error :->

--Beman


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