Re: [boost] [rfc] I/O Library Design

From: Mathias Gaunard (mathias.gaunard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-17 14:14:31

Sebastian Redl wrote:

> Now I have a preliminary design document ready and would like to have
> some feedback from the Boost community on it.
> 
> The document can be found here:
> http://windmuehlgasse.getdesigned.at/newio/
> 
> I'd especially like input on the unresolved issues, but all comments are
> welcome, even if you tell me that what I'm doing is completely pointless
> and misguided. (At least I'd know not to waste my time with refining and
> implementing the design. :-))

I personally think that there is no use in distinguishing between text 
and binary I/O. For I/O, you need a binary representation. To get it, 
you can serialize your object any way you like. This shouldn't be the 
job of a "binary formatting layer", even though having separate 
utilities to serialize/unserialize basic types to common representations 
would be useful (double to Little Endian IEEE 754 Double-precision for 
example).
Also, I believe the narrow/wide characters and locales stuff is broken 
beyond all repair, so I wouldn't recommend to do anything related to that.

I also think text formatting is a different need than I/O.
Indeed, it is often needed to generate a formatted string which is then 
given to a GUI Toolkit or whatever.