[boost] Re: Formal review of "Output Formatters" library begins today

From: Andy Little (andy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-09-19 12:12:58

"John Torjo" <john.lists_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:414443E0.60008_at_torjo.com...
> Dear boosters,
>
> The FORMAL Review of "Output Formatter" library begins today,
> Sept 12, 2004.

> 1. What is your evaluation of the design?

It is simple, but seems designed so that more complex  (What ?) "Output
Shapes" can be created ie by nesting, from the basic building blocks.

> 2. What is your evaluation of the implementation?

Only a preliminary glance.. hence no comment. As long as it works  and all
that :-)

> 3. What is your evaluation of the documentation?

Full marks for style. Informative examples and shows off the potential of
the library quite well, though  I didnt read it in depth.

> 4. What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?

 Having read the later posts about the library, a useful goal of the
libarary would be xml and html formatting, possibly It might be useful in
rendering various text formats, e.g dxf and csv.,files, both for input and
output.... but trivial I guess.  I assume that the format object could be
serialised somewhere along with the data which might be useful to
interrrogate on input.   However the abstraction is interesting. The process
of transforming a serial stream into 2 or more dimensions seems to have a
generic flavour, though what other uses there may be I couldnt put my finger
on. I guess parsing is the term I am looking  for, though I havent looked in
enough to see where delimiting stops and parsing begins. Wordprocessing
?.... I dont know.

> 5. Did you try to use the library?
>     With what compiler?  Did you have any problems?

I tried out  and played around with some of the test/ example  programs on
VC7.1. No problems were encountered at all.

> 6. How much effort did you put into your evaluation?
>     A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study?

No more than a superficial look really.

> 7. Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

No.

>
> And most important,
> 8. Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library?

I abstain from voting.

Another question is could I make use of the library. I do like the 2D 3D
matrix examples, which I have only looked at briefly, but hopefully I might
find these useful for generating matrices in source code.

regards
Andy Little