[boost] Re: Formal review or Variant Library (Ed B.)

From: Eric Friedman (ebf_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-02-18 20:10:06

David Abrahams wrote:
[snip]
> BTW, I just realized that a conversion from variant<T> to optional<T>
> could be used to do extraction as well.  Maybe it would be better to
> ditch extract altogether and just use optional?

I had thought about this before, but I dismissed it (perhaps too quickly)
because I do not believe optional can contain references (i.e.,
optional<T&>) because references themselves are non-copyable.

Perhaps though optional< reference_wrapper<T> > could be returned? Thoughts?

Eric