[boost] Re: lexical_cast and boost-1.30

From: Kevlin Henney (kevlin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-03-14 03:05:01

In article <Pine.LNX.4.44.0303131439490.24179-100000_at_boyne.cs.ualberta.c
a>, Dave Gomboc <dave_at_[hidden]> writes
>
>I would vote to fix lexical_cast before release.  

Looking at the regression tests from last night, that appears to have
happened.

>Frankly, wchar_t support in lexical_cast isn't as important as fixing the
>space problem, I'd rather the fix go in even if it regresses in this area
>-- unless someone pipes up to say they are actually USING wchar_t and
>lexical_cast on a compiler that won't grok the new code.  And if there is
>such a person, then I'd appreciate the ugly hack of including both
>versions with #ifdefs.

My sense is that only a few people have commented on lack of wchar_t
support, whereas space is the final frontier that has hit many more.

At the cost of a little duplicate code and a #ifdef the newer version is
much more reticent about its support for wchar_t. Any compiler that does
not fully support built-in wchar_t, wstring and wide-character streams
does not receive any support at all for wchar_t, even though the code
might kind of work in some cases, eg VC7 compiled without native wchar_t
support no longer offers support for wide-character lexical_cast, even
though the tests pass 100% in that case. So if anyone now complains
about apparent lack of wchar_t support in lexical_cast, they should
contact their compiler and library vendors rather than the Boost list
;-)

Kevlin
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