[boost] Re: Pedantic changes to noncopyable

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-03-18 17:26:14

At 10:26 PM 3/17/00 -0500, Dave Abrahams wrote:

><steam rising...>
>
>We eschew exception-specifications at boost. For the reasons why,
see...
>
>[Sheesh, Beman, I guess this comes up often enough that we ought to
get the
>rationale on the site. Egroups is a lovely host but their search
engine
>leaves something to be desired. I can't find the original posting.]
>
>In brief, they provide no compile-time safety and lead to worse
generated
>code on many (if not most) compilers.

Yes.  I will add something to the library guidelines.  If you would
like to expand the "In brief," above to a paragraph or two, I will
add that.

I am starting to experiment more with HTML documentation,
particularly supplying a simple statement like: "Boost guidelines are
to avoid exception-specifications" with a link to more details
including rationale.

<rant>

I believe that not supplying rationale is a major defect in many
software projects.  Lack of available rationale causes issues to
revisited endlessly, causes all sorts of maintenance bugs when a
programmer changes something without realizing it was done a certain
way for a purpose, and shortens the useful lifetime of code.

Rationale is fairly easy to provide at the time decisions are made,
but very hard to recover even a short time later.

I guess the docs for proposed boost libraries should be reviewed to
see that there is rationale for major design decisions.

</end rant>

--Beman