Re: [boost] Gender neutral documentation

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-07 13:35:09

Joel de Guzman <joel_at_[hidden]> writes:

> David Abrahams wrote:
>> brangdon_at_[hidden] (Dave Harris) writes:
>> 
>>>>   For example, if Bind is unneeded the user can discard it
>>>>   completely.
>>>>
>>>>is much more to the point.
>>>
>>>But "is unneeded" again fails to say who doesn't need it, and hence fails 
>>>to say why it isn't needed. 
>> 
>> 
>> I don't see how saying who doesn't need it would indicate anything
>> about why it isn't needed.
>> 
>> 
>>>It's vague. 
>> 
>> 
>> Very slightly, but then the original statement is vague.  What kind
>> of "discarding" are we talking about, anyway?  If the user doesn't
>> need Bind he... doesn't have to use it.  What is there to discard?
>
> The Bind module? 

Yeah, but what do you mean by "discard?"  Remove the headers from the
disk?

If that's what you mean, I think you should say so.

> The context is about modular vs. monolithic
> architectures. I wanted to emphasize orthogonality and clean
> lines that separate each module. For reference, here's the
> context in whole: http://tinyurl.com/c7kdl. Why is that important?
> you can strip it to the core and it will still be useful. I am
> a big fan of that ability. For instance, there's a package of
> Spirit that uses only a minimal subset of Boost (we call miniboost).
> When stripped to the core, Spirit should still be usable, with
> lesser dependencies on underlying libraries. Modular libraries
> are a joy to use in that regard. An original objective was to
> make the core Spirit dependencies as small as say, Tokenizer.
> This is only possible if the underlying libraries be as modular
> as possible.

Agreed.  

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com