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

From: Julio M. Merino Vidal (jmmv84_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-23 16:33:07

On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 14:52 -0500, christopher diggins wrote:

> 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.

Ok; I'll summarize and add them to the page, as I did with the other
mails.  Hope it's ok with you.

In fact, I think that it'd be good to keep it as a document rather than
a repository for emails.  That way, most of it could easily end up in
the final BoostBook documentation.

> 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

Hmm indeed, much clearer.  Any special reason about why you used the
'>' operator in the example?  I'm wondering if '|' could make sense
(from the shell), although it doesn't implicitly reflect a "direction".
Or what about '>>'? One could think of a process' pipeline as a stream
(I think that would make sense if one considers the concepts of Source,
Sink and Filter from Boost.Iostreams).

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

You're welcome.  I'm quite motivated to work on this ATM, although my
free time has radically decreased (got back to university this week).
Anyway, I'll try to do what I can, but no promises.

Cheers,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84_at_[hidden]>
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jmmv/
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/