Re: [boost] [Ann] Variadic Templates

From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-10-02 02:09:37

First, Hats off to Doug for great work yet again. :-)

Doug: still looking forward to that blog... :-)

On 8/8/06, Bronek Kozicki <brok_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Besides things that are rather obvious (builtin support for typelists, "typesafe
> printf", much improved forwarding, construction of heterogeneous collections) I
> wonder if it might be first step towards opening C++ to yet another programming
> paradigm - functional. Anyone here to investigate it?
>

I had recently been looking into implementing my own "yet another
functional programming library" for my personal understanding, and I
definitely think variadic templates will help a lot in making truly
generic (and not so preprocessor dependent) functional programming
libraries. That said, it's a library, not really a language extension
(I don't have the powers Doug has with regards to compiler hacking).

Having said this, there are already a number of functional programming
libraries out there for C++ -- mainly for creating lambda expressions
used with STL predicates and functors. The best (or most I've read
about) I've seen so far is Phoenix (I think to be released as Phoenix
2 and made part of Boost sometime in the future).

It certainly should be worthwhile to implement language extensions to
allow for truly functional programming in C++. However, for now I'd
like to think a library implementation would suffice (albeit with
considerable amount of work).

So the short answer to your question is, yes there are people looking
into functional programming for C++. I personally am very interested
in such an effort, and <shameless plug>have been blogging a lot about
it</shameless plug>.

-- 
Dean Michael C. Berris
C++ Software Architect
Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co.
web: http://software.orangeandbronze.com/
email: dean_at_[hidden]
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