Re: [boost] [property_tree review] Making the interface leaner, concretely...

From: Thorsten Ottosen (thorsten.ottosen_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-23 16:01:05

Ivan Vecerina wrote:
> "Thorsten Ottosen" <thorsten.ottosen_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 

> : But it is also true that it is over encapsulated: there is no invariant

> : Here are some other examples of classes that has been designed
> : as over-encapsulated:

> : - standard containers
> In what way?

Lack of inplace-construction or construction with uninitialized dataor
or acceptance of a buffer to give to the vector.

This hurts performance in libraries such as serialization or asio.

> : > Do you think that std::string is an example that ptree wants to 
> follow?
> :
> : No. 

> : If the free-standing functions are not generic, there is little point
> : in not making them members. Having free-standing functions like
> : get/set is a bad bad idea with the current rules for ADL.
> 
> I didn't explicitly indicate that the functions were templates,
> but they obviously would be.

They are templates, yes, but still mention basic_ptree.

> If we really want to provide member functions for ease-of-use
> purposes, then I believe that we should make this a separate
> class from the ptree "container".
> It would be pretty straightforward to do so.

In the same manner operator[]() could have been left out
of std::map<T>, yet is is one of the most convenient functions.

-Thorsten