Re: [boost] Technical session at the October C++ meeting?

From: John Max Skaller (skaller_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-08-16 19:52:02

Jeremy Siek wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, John Max Skaller wrote:
> skalle>
> skalle>         Also, while I think of it, I suggest that the proposals
> skalle> go for 'tentative acceptance' by the committee. 

> The proposals, if successful, will be going into a technical report
> published by the C++ committee. This report will be not be an actual part
> of the stardard, it will merely be a recomendation, and a notice about
> what will likely be in the next revision of the stadard. So in a sense it
> is tentative.
> 
> However, I would very much argue against people submitting stuff when they
> think the public interface is likely to change. Lets try not to inflict
> portability problems on the C++ user community. They have enough problems
> to deal with already :)

        The problem is, the submittors do not know if the
rest of the committee will want to change the interface.

        For example: I will recommend against mutators for
tuples. Is the tuples author going to remove mutability
just because of that? Who knows if the committee as a whole
will agree with me or not?

        Historically, a LOT of interface details of
libraries have been changed. That is, you can be sure
that every submission is going to be changed!
The best example is the string class or iostreams.
Both changed _substantially_ (mainly due to STL,
but that wasn't the only factor).

        In particular, core language support for
tuples is likely to radically alter not just the
tuples library, but a whole lot of other high
level meta-programming libraries. But that support
doesn't yet exist. I think you just have to consider
boost libraries a starting point for development.

        Perhaps Beman can describe better the kinds
of things the LWG does to libraries over time.

        Did you see 'auto_ptr'? Did you know
I proposed that class, and that the semantics
were utterly different: it was designed
to simply make 

        T * x 

on the stack exception safe. noncopyable.
non assignable. Just a holder that made stacked
pointers look like ordinary auto objects.
[That's why it's called 'auto' ptr]

-- 
John (Max) Skaller, mailto:skaller_at_[hidden] 
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