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

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-09-20 14:20:03

Vladimir Prus wrote:

>A particularly interesting question is how the proposed library overlaps
>with serialization. When outputting vector<Function> I'd prefer the content
>of 'Function' to be outputted too, preferably by describing the members
>with the 'serialize' method. And the question is if I can use outfmt
>library, or have to use the serialization library? The serialization
>library is pretty large, so, I'd like outfmt to be able to output UDT which
>have 'serialize' defined. IMO, vector<some_UDT> is a very common case,
>maybe even more common than vector<pair<int, int> >.

If one had nothing else to do, he could make a derivation of one of the
existing archives (e.g. text_archive) that would "annotate" the
serialization.  This might be useful for debugging or other purposes.  On
the other hand, I just use the xml_archive for that purpose now and its fine
(although a little verbose). It also plays nice with XML browsing tools.  So
that's handy.

My real observation is that I see this as orthogonal to serialization and
that it should remain that way.  I don't seen any real overlap now except
that there might be a couple of instances where either one might do.  I
think even these would be rare cases.  I would resist any idea to intertwine
these concepts.

Robert Ramey