Re: [boost] Container Traits

From: Pavol Droba (droba_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-03-02 17:37:43

Hi,

Purpose of this library is to unify an access to an arbitrary "collection".
Concept of the collection is defined in a paper which is currently
perfectly hidden in boost/libs/utility/Collection.html

Major benefit it brings is, that it is possible to define non-intrusive, yet
uniform stl-like access to containers where is would not be possible otherwise.
This allows us to create generic algorithm, that work on wider range of containers,
not just those in stl.

container traits (or collection traits as it should be renamed) concept is heavily used
by string_algo library. For instance the library can handle c-char arrays in much  
the same way as std::string

Classification has been proposed, but without a little help from stl, it is rather hard
to implement satisfactory. Because it is forbiden to introduce a code into std namespace,
we cannot make forward declaration of std containers. So to make specialization needed
for clasification, we would have to include all container headers. 

Regards,

Pavol

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 01:50:21PM -0800, Powell, Gary wrote:
> This library is an interesting concept but when I looked in it, it didn't have what I would have thought were "container traits" the way I think of "iterator traits". From the VTL library I wanted to be able to query the container to see if it was an associative container, or a sequence container or a random access container, i.e. had an operator[]() etc.
> 
> Can one of the authors explain the purpose of this library?
> 
>   Yours,
>   -Gary-
> 
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