Re: [boost] Re: Re: rtl (Range Template Library)

From: John Torjo (john.lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-20 12:48:34

Hi Brian,

> You may be interested to read
> 
>    http://groups.google.com/groups?q=brian+mcnamara+range+group:comp.lang.c%2B%2B.moderated+group:comp.lang.c%2B%2B.moderated&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=comp.lang.c%2B%2B.moderated&selm=8gm2i6%24gbt%241%40news-int.gatech.edu&rnum=5
> 
Yup, read it.
As a matter of fact, the range thing has been on my mind for quite a few years 
as well.

The crange class is (a little better) interval ;)

However, I donot think that algorithms should operate on intervals, because 
usually this makes harder for them to work.

An algorithm should operate on iterators, that is just fine with me. What we 
wanted to make easier is using algorithms/iterators/containers/ranges in code. 
And think we did a pretty good job;)

Any STL algorithm can easily be adapted to work with a range.
If you look as how we did it, we used macros (ugly:( ), but this allows us to 
add new algorithms very easy. And portable as well - once a change needs to be 
made, we minimized the impact of the code to be changed;)

> 
> Brian's non-interesting observation of the day: There seems to be lots 
> of concept-refactoring and library-interface-redesign going on here at
> Boost.  Would that we all had design omniscience!  We would have saved
> ourselves a lot of time!  :)
> 

That is so true;)
The thing is IMO that in the CVS, in the original index, I think we should 
include the libraries under development as well (a separate section). This way 
we would have found out about sequence_algo and reused it;)
For instance, I found out about the <iterator> library by mistake - I tried 
using the <view> library, and it included some files from the <iterator> 
library. Therefore, I looked through the docs for <iterator> ;)

Best,
John