Re: [boost] Re: algorithms namespace

From: Pavol Droba (droba_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-02-18 13:14:44

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 05:23:29PM +0000, Reece Dunn wrote:
> Stefan Slapeta wrote:
> >Pavol Droba wrote:
> >
> >>It is not really reasonable to await from
> >>    a user to always type boost::algorithm::string::trim.
> >>
> >
> >Maybe it could help a little bit to replace 'algorithm' by 'algo' and 
> >'string' by 'str'.
> >
> >IMHO, also shorter namespaces like 'boost::filesystem' have the problem of 
> >beeing too long to be used on every access. Long typenames like 
> >boost::filesystem::directory_iterator have a very high capability to make 
> >the code unreadable very quickly.
> 
> why not use:
>   namespace sa = boost::algorithm::string;
>   sa::trim( ... );
> or
>   namespace fs = boost::filesystem;
>   fs::directory_iterator di = ...;
> 
> Surely this gives you what you are after (shorter namespace names) without 
> modifying the namespace currently used by the library (which will break 
> existing code that uses the libraries).
> 
> This is what namespace aliases are for and is used for the filesystem 
> library in the regression test implementation.

Namespace aliasing is common practice, but the problem with the algorithm namespace
lies elsewhere.

If there would be just one boost::algorithm and everything inside it, than aliasing 
would work just fine. But imagine having

namespace algo=boost::algorithm;
namespace sa=boost::algorithm::string;
namespace ca=boost::algorithm::container;

It is easy to get lost in such a lot of namespace. One would have to look into the docs
to see which algoritm lies in which namespace. It could realy be painful.

Regards,

Pavol