RE: Fun Projects [was Re: [boost] Thoughts on Roman numbers]

From: Noah Stein (Noah_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-28 02:41:49

> -----Original Message-----
> From: boost-bounces_at_[hidden]
> [mailto:boost-bounces_at_[hidden]]On Behalf Of Joel de Guzman
> Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2002 8:48 PM

> Once, we thought about doing a morse code to ascii converter
> using expression templates and *EXTREME* abuse of
> operator overloading. This should raise some eyebrows, for sure.
> Example:
>
> std::cout << --*---**--*-*-- morse << std::endl;
>

Yeah, that was my idea when we were talking about writing a general operator
sequence engine on the spirit list, back during the discussion of compound
operators.  I have some code lying around for it.  The plan is that the
morse code turns into a single ASCII string and is as fast to print as any
char* since that's all that's passed to the stream.  What's funny is that
the morse thing was the first thing I thought of too after reading the post
about light-hearted libraries.  Great minds think alike... and so do ours!
;)

I also planned on making a little VM so that I could write entire functions
in morse.  It really wouldn't be much different than what goes on in Phoenix
or Lambda.  It would also have the additional benefit of more
meta-information:  the morse name could be hashed for use in a table, etc.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to get back to it some time.  Too bad there's
too much needed code right now.  I think people would appreciate a
VC6-compatible multi_pass iterator much more than a morse-printer.  :)

-- Noah