[boost] Re: Variant Library Review

From: Andrei Alexandrescu (andrewalex_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-03-04 20:31:40

> In most part design of the library looks solid and well thought-out( I
think
> we definitely ought to give Andrei credits for this also).

By the way, any chance to tweak the acknowledgments a bit. They mention
"Generic<Programming>: Discriminated Unions" Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. C/C++
Users Journal. 2002", but the text doesn't mention the earlier publication,
which is
http://oonumerics.org/tmpw01/alexandrescu.pdf. I think that's where various
kinds of visitation in the context of C++ discriminated unions were first
considered a core feature, together with a number of more obvious things
(that made it or not), such as using typelists, computing alignment, and
dispatching via pseudo-vtables.

Also, the ack text doesn't say whether the work above influenced at all the
library design or is just previous work developed unbeknownst to the
authors - the Generic<Programming> reference is specified in the
bibliography as [Ale02] without being referred to at all.

If the authors were aware of the previous work and used it as a source of
inspiration, it's nice to give credit where it is due. It costs nothing and
it is considerate. Just recently I failed to give due credit and boy it
didn't feel good.

Andrei