Re: [boost] if(f) technique

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-06-09 13:32:02

From: "David Abrahams" <abrahams_at_[hidden]>

> I am of two minds:
>
> 1. I like this. You can "poison" operators==/!= to prevent them from
> working. It might be worth enshrining this as a Boost.Operators template
or
> something (including poisoning) so that the idiom can be easily re-used.
> Don't tell me it's just syntactic sugar; /everything/ is syntactic sugar;
> syntax counts! If it didn't, we'd just write machine code.
>
> 2. What a waste of time; this is just syntactic sugar. It doesn't even
make
> things very sweet, and it comes with associated dangers (op==/!=). Getting
> it right is complicated, and complexifies the code.

:-)

The intent wasn't "all your classes must provide this" but rather "if you
absolutely must support the if(f) syntax (std::basic_ios anyone?), this is
the 'least wrong' way to do it." :-)

--
Peter Dimov
Multi Media Ltd.