Re: [boost] Why use Boost?

From: Sebastian Redl (sebastian.redl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-03 06:19:25

Paul Giaccone wrote:

>The issue is this: the current documents say "Library X does Y", or, in 
>functional notation, y = foo(x).  If you know x, you can find y.  
>Unfortunately, the new user knows y, and so needs x = bar(y), where 
>bar() is the inverse of foo().  (What's more, the user doesn't even know 
>that they need x = bar(y) because they don't know that Boost deals with 
>y by providing bar(y) until they start hunting through the docs.)
>  
>
The problem is that foo(x) returns multiple values, thus there are more 
bar(y) functions for each x than is practical to list. In other words, x 
and y are not isomorphic.

To get away from the analogy, what I'm saying is that since there is no 
standardized description for each problem that each user comes up with 
intuitively, a user searching for specific functionality can take no 
shortcuts - he'll still have to search through the short description of 
each library, for which the alphabetic library list is adequate, and the 
categorized listing even more so. (The descriptions could be made a bit 
longer, perhaps. Perhaps.)

Sebastian Redl