Re: [boost] More comments on the Bind library submission?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-08-16 20:27:20

At 06:26 PM 8/15/2001, Ross Smith wrote:

 >I really dislike the "_number" notation for placeholders. First, it
 >doesn't stand out -- it looks too much like an ordinary integer
 >argument. (This is particularly confusing in the examples in the
 >documentation, where most of the arguments _are_ integers.) In addition
 >to the visual confusion, this also means that they're only one very
 >small typo away from a bug that could be very hard to track down.

The one small typo issue can become acute in some environments.  For 
example, the C++ standard itself is maintained as a troff text.  That means 
no WYSIWYG editor, and formatting commands sometimes obscuring the 
context.  The problem then becomes not so much "_2" (you know what that 
means) but "2".  You can't tell if you are looking at a typo that should be 
"_2".

That's an odd environment, and not a killer argument, but does point out 
that longer names are less subject to confusion because of more redundancy.

--Beman