[boost] powerset

From: Dave Gomboc (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-08-28 14:26:33

> >If all the elements of the set are known at compile time, why
> >do you need to store the bits at all? Your class can encode
> >the information in its type, thus, your class can consume
> >zero bytes.
> 
> right up until you need to add (or subtract) something that isn't knows 
> until runtime.

...which doesn't always happen.  There are certainly things I could use it
for at compile-time, rather than my existing practice of generating a
header file containing an array of magic numbers with an external program.

Back to naming: this new proposed set is no more discrete than the STL's
set, so "discrete_set" is a misnomer.  I think that the best name I've
heard so far here for it (other than "set", which is taken :-) is
"powerset".  Was there something wrong with that suggestion?

Also (albeit without having put much thought into it) it seems to me that 
there ought to be a lot of overlap with bitset/dyn_bitset/etc.  Can all of 
these be rolled into one somehow?

Dave