[boost] any_container?

From: Geoff Leyland (geoff.leyland_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-09-05 09:20:40

Hi,

I wrote to the list some time ago about a container for holding "any" 
(or at least for the moment, my cheap equivalent to any).  At one point 
I said I'd put something up for people to look at by the end of the 
week.  So, it's next month, and I've finally tidied it up a bit, and you 
can get it to have a look at it.

It's at http://leniwww.epfl.ch/~geoff/rts_boost.tgz

I've compiled in under CW 8.2 and an apple-modified gcc 3.1 under osx 
10.2.  There's a CW project and makefile in rts_boost/rts/build.

What is it?  It's containers for a thing like an any, to enable the use 
of "run time structures".  There's maps (like structures) and vectors.  
So you can go

whatever_map				m;

m["a[5].b.c.d"] = 3.0;
m["a"][6]["b.c.d"] = "hello";

and so on.  It can also read such a container from a simple text file 
(using a very cheap and nasty parser I hand-wrote):

a =
{
   b = [1 "hello" false 3.0]
   c.d = "a name"
}

and so on...

I find it very useful, and there was a little interest from others in 
the list.  On the other hand, it's not really finished or up to boost 
standard or anything like that.  I tried to be careful about exception 
safety in the container code, but otherwise there's lots of things to 
fix.  Clearly the contained type should be "any" (dynamic_any would be 
better) or even parameterised, the parser "needs work" and so on.

If there's any interest and any ideas, I'll have a go at making it 
better.

Cheers,
Geoff

--
Geoff Leyland
Laboratoire d'energetique industrielle
LENI-DGM-EPFL, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland
Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone]