Views library in vault

From: Gary Powell (Gary.Powell_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-04-19 10:11:42

Hi,
  I have placed a copy of the "views" library in the vault. While the 
namespace was changed to "boost" gcc 2.95.2 has a compile bug that 
causes it to crash if you use namespaces and this library. (It has to 
do with a conflict with friend member template operators, which we 
use for conversion/assignment i.e. const_view = view;) So namespaces 
are not tested.

  This library also violates the standard rules about adding things 
to the namespace std. VTL adds new versions of swap to the std 
namespace so that callers to std::swap using a view will get our 
version and not the std version. It's the best of a lot of worse 
choices.

  In addition, it violates the rules about forward declarations of 
container classes. (They are prohibited) These declarations are all 
in one file, stl_traits.h, so if your compiler has problems with them 
you can either include the correct files or fix it. The reasoning is 
that by forward declaring the containers we can reduce the compile 
time by elimination of unnecessary parsing. All we are interested in 
is some trait information about the containers.

  The .html doc's are designed to be linked to the SGI STL pages. 
There is a file, localize.sh in the doc's directory to setup these 
links. It is suggested that you either have your own copy or use the 
sgi net pages. We also "borrowed" art from the SGI pages so that the 
banners would look like it was part of this same library. That was on 
purpose, as this library is supposed to fit seamlessly with the std 
stl library.

  While it can be argued that a library as large and as narrowly 
scoped as this one is, doesn't deserve to be added to the "std", it 
does show some of the problems with the current standard. i.e. the 
issue of traits about std containers, and name lookup issues as shown 
by the problems of doing the right thing with swap.

  Let me or Martin know about problems/issues.

  -gary-
gary.powell_at_[hidden]