Re: [boost] Formal Review: Boost Cast Library

From: Jesse Jones (jejones_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-12-06 23:24:14

>Today begins the formal review of the Boost Cast Library, available at:
>http://www.egroups.com/files/boost/cast.zip
>Code and documentation included.
>
>For anyone who missed the initial discussion, cast.hpp has never been
>formally accepted into boost as it was in boost before there were
>reviews.  Also, we have lexical_cast included in this library.
>
>Complete details on the review process can be found at:
>http://www.boost.org/more/formal_review_process.htm
>
>Please remember to put your recommendation about acceptance at the top
>of the message.  Messages may be sent to the list or directly to me.

I looked at cast.hpp and it seems to work OK with CW 6 on a Mac (although
the test spewed out more verbiage than seems neccesary and there's that
weird line that has the "see if compiler generates warning" comment).

polymorphic_cast and polymorphic_downcast are rather trivial and seem to
mostly be rarely useful so I'm inclined to say that they should not be part
of boost.

numeric_cast OTOH is very useful and not quite as trivial. I use something
like it in my own code. The only question I have is whether it should throw
or assert on failure. In my own code a failure almost always indicates a
programmer error so I'd prefer the assert.

  -- Jesse