[boost] C++ committee Library TR progress in Santa Cruz

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-27 10:18:54

The C++ committee met in Santa Cruz, California, this past week. As has 
become the norm, lots of Boosters were present to help with standard 
library work.

This was the first meeting were the Library Working Group did detailed 
technical reviews of formal proposals for the Library Technical Report. 
Reviewed were:

* Type traits
* Regular expressions
* Hash tables (a non-Boost proposal from Matt Austern)
* Function object wrappers
* Tuples

The LWG had issues, usually fairly minor, with all of these and returned 
them to their authors for further work.

Doug Gregor, Jaakko Jarvi, and Gary Powell were at the meeting, and worked 
until 3 AM revising and syncing their proposals. These revisions were 
accepted by the LWG, and then the full committee, so function object 
wrappers and tuples became the first libraries formally accepted for the 
Library TR. Congratulations!

The issues regarding Type traits and Regex have been forwarded to John 
Maddock. While some of them are messy (ECMAScript regex doesn't apparently 
have internationalization support, for example), they seem solvable without 
undue delay.

The hash table issues are trivial, and probably would have been fixed on 
the spot except that the issue of the exact class names is contentious. 
Since that isn't a Boost related issue, no need to describe those concerns 
in detail.

Jeff Garland presented the Boost Date-Time library to the LWG, and there is 
considerable interest. The LWG would like to see a formal proposal. A 
primary area of concern is the need to match the scope of the proposal with 
the committee's interest in standardizing the framework of a date/time 
library plus commonly needed specifics, but not get involved with the Mayan 
calendar-like odities.

The next C++ committee meeting is in Oxford, England, UK, in April. This 
meeting is the deadline for formal Library TR proposals, so if you are 
thinking of submitting something you need to get moving.  Contact me if you 
need to know more details.

--Beman