[boost] Re: Stdint header?

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 1999-08-03 07:09:46

At 09:06 PM 7/28/99 +0100, Kevlin Henney wrote:

>The alternative is to provide a template based solution, rather than
death
>by a thousand typedefs/#defines. I did something like this, and
outlined
>the details in a couple of articles for Overload when Sean was
editing it a
>few years ago. I'd be happy to dig it up and submit the code as a
library.
>
>Thoughts?

My first response to Kevlin was perhaps unfairly negative.  Maybe we
ought to explore the alternatives to the C stdint.h header a bit.  If
there is a better way, we should at least consider it.

The possible approaches I can see are:

*  A template approach where the user would write code like:

     int_t<32>::exact   // to obtain the 32-bit integer type
     int_t<32>::max()   // to obtain the maximum value

*  A typedef and constant approach where the user would write:

     int32              // to obtain the 32-bit integer type
     INT32_MAX          // to obtain the maximum value

While the template approach seems conceptually more elegant, I find
the resulting user code unbearably ugly.  The typedef and constant
approach is basically stdint.h without the macros, a nice advantange.

Kevlin, what did your template approach look like?

Are there other possiblities?

--Beman