RE: [boost] Filesystem attributes

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-03-03 13:23:42

> > It's not my preferred interface approach in general b/c I believe
> > the design is more obscure and outside convention for new users.
>
>
> If I can convince others, too, that property maps are the way to go (the
> first attempt into this direction was an article in C++ Report about
> "Data Access Templates"...) it will become *the* approach and it would
> be in no way obscure. I discussed this issue with several committee
> members already but I think either they weren't really interested or
> didn't understand the issue or both. Some years back I discussed the
> property map approach with Alexander Stepanov (at this time they were
> still under the name "Data Accessors") and a lot of time to convince him
> of the usefulness of this abstraction - and we could only agree on the
> distinction between between reads and writes being important... There is
> *more* to this simple abstraction. Much more!

I'm not sure I see the "much more" aspect. And unfortunately this really goes
against a tide of "OO" think that exists in all sorts of libraries including the
standard library.  That is, I don't expect to see much of this kind of code:

  std::string foo("bar");
  std::cout << get<size>(foo) << std::endl;

any time soon.

> >It's just that dir_entry provides no public methods....
>
> I would go even further and say that the "dir_entry" (if this is what
> the opaque type is called) is only declared but not defined in user
> visible headers.

Yes, agreed.

Jeff