Re: [boost] Re: Proposal: Library to manage processes

From: christopher diggins (cdiggins_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-23 14:52:26

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Julio M. Merino Vidal" <jmmv84_at_[hidden]>
To: "Boost Development" <boost_at_[hidden]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 2:14 PM
Subject: Re: [boost] Re: Proposal: Library to manage processes

> On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 13:43 -0700, Jonathan Turkanis wrote:
>> Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
> Ok, I've just created a section in the Boost Wiki to collect ideas for
> the library.

Great!

> Please feel free to add whatever you find missing or comment on the
> actual stuff.  (Specially about the "stream merging stuff".)

Well I am still on the fence whether I even want to use the wiki (I don't 
like the possibility of my comments being moved or erased), so I'll still 
make some comments here on the mailing list.

I have some more comment operator overloading: I can sympathize with the 
desire to keep with tradition of shell notation, but in a programming 
language we have types which completely negates the need for three separate 
operators. In a shell, the three separate operators ( >, <, | ) are used by 
the shell to decide how to interpret the different arguments. However this 
is not needed in a (mostly) typed programming language like C++ because the 
type indicates how each symbol should behave in an expression.

Writing code like:

  b | c > d < a;

IMO just looks weird in C++ and is going to surprise everyone who is 
unfamiliar with traditional shell syntax, which is a very fast growing group 
of relatively young programmers who can't really be ignored.

I see absolutely no reason to not move to something which is inherently more 
logical like:

  a > b > c > d

Anyway, I am very pleased to see you taking the initiative on this project 
Julio.

Christopher Diggins
Object Oriented Template Library (OOTL)
http://www.ootl.org