[boost] [iostreams] names for non-blocking character properties

From: Jonathan Turkanis (technews_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-03-07 22:29:17

Hi All,

Everybody likes naming questions, right?

The thread "[iostreams] Major interface changes planned" discussed having the
get() function return a type (basic_character, character or wcharacter) which
can hold either a character, an EOF indication or an EAGAIN indication. My
question is what I should call the functions which query the state of a
basic_character.

My first idea was to use

   bool good(character c)  - returns true if c represents a character rather
than EOF or EAGAIN
   bool eof(chacrater c) - returns true if c represent EOF
   bool fail(character c) - returns true if c represents EAGAIN.

These functions have the same names as member functions of basic_ios. However,
since fail() above doesn't mean exactly the same thing as basic_ios::fail(), I
now think this is a bad idea.

Here are the names I've thought of:

   good:  good, is_good
   eof:     eof, is_eof
   fail:     fail, eagain, is_eagain, would_block, should_retry

I also need names for the two functions called by implementations of get() to
return characters representing EOF and EAGAIN. E.g.,

       template<typename Source>
       character get(Source& src)
       {
             ...
             if ( ... )
                 return eof();
            else
                 return eagain();
        }

(They will actually return instances of types convertible to basic_character.)

What do you think?

Jonathan