iostate review

From: Brey, Edward D (EdwardDBrey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-13 14:23:46

I think that iostate should be accepted into Boost.  I generally agree with
the comments of past reviews and have tried to repeat any of them here.
Following are the areas of improvement that I see for iostate:

Library naming:

- Iostate isn't really a suitable name for the library (and hence header
file), since iostate already has a meaning, which is more specific that what
you are trying to cover.  (This class saves iostate, plus many other
properties.)  Perhaps stream_state or ios_state would be better.

Documentation:

- Contents of index.html should be merged into iostate.html, since this is
such a small library.  Having the extra level in between the main boost
library page and the actual documentation of the library slows down
browsing.  When the user clicks on iostate from the boost library index
page, the first think that he should see is a brief description and a
"Hello, world" example.

- The fact that the iostate.html header includes any other headers should
not be part of the public interface.  Hence, it would be better to show it
in the documented synopsis.  Part of the problem stems from the fact is that
document lists a "header synopsis", which isn't exactly what the reader
needs to know.  The information that should be presented is simply a list of
classes are guaranteed by be declared/defined when a header is included.

Wish list:

- A predefined saver that saved all formatting adjustments would be quite
nice.  Specifically, this would combine the savers flags, precision, width,
fill, and locale.

- A manipulator version would be nice.  A sample usage would be:
   cout << save_stream_format << setw(5) << x;