Re: [boost] Proposal: string_cast

From: Mattias Flodin (flodin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-04-06 02:54:07

When you do, please try not to leave the Unicode question out of the
discussion. A separate name such as to_wstring seems insufficient to me because
there are times when you cannot know beforehand whether the string type you're
casting to is single-byte or Unicode (e.g. when writing generic code). I have
posted a plausible solution (using partial specialization on the contained
character type) before in
http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/boost/msg27288.php

In fact, functionality for directly converting between ASCII and Unicode might
also be something that people would consider to be a "lexical cast." Perhaps
this is not something that everyone feels would be of use to the common
programmer, but to programmers working with international applications I think
it would. The standard already has half-hearted support for these people. Why
not aim for making it whole-hearted (certainly, that would take much more work
than just fiddling with lexical_cast, but it's a start...).

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 09:19:50PM -0500, Beman Dawes wrote:
> At 05:52 PM 4/3/2002, Jan Langer wrote:
> 
>  >>I also added this to the Wiki page on Lexical Cast for the next time 
> 
>  >this comes up....
>  >
>  >although the archive seems to handle some threads incorrectly, i read
>  >through the mentioned messages and there are several requests for 
> this
>  >simple change and there are no serious concerns. the only question is
>  >whether to make it a new function to_string or to specialize
>  >lexical_cast for std::string.
>  >so why isn't it done?
>  >
>  >is there more need for discussion or is there no one who wants to do
>  >the actual work? or does it need a formal review ;-) ?
> 
> I've started to pester Kevlin Henney.  If he isn't going to work on 
> lexical_cast issues, we ought to let someone else have a go at them.
> 
> But there are tricky issues involved, so I hope anyone working on a 
> proposal will run it by Kevlin for his opinion.
> 
> --Beman

-- 
Mattias Flodin <flodin_at_[hidden]>  -  http://www.cs.umu.se/~flodin/
Room NADV 102
Department of Computing Science
Umeå University
S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
--
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We
don't believe this to be a coincidence." --Jeremy S. Anderson