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

From: Jeremy Maitin-Shepard (jbms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-19 16:33:39

Andrey Semashev <andysem_at_[hidden]> writes:

[snip]

>  From my point of view we have touched two problems in the discussion: 
> the ability to easy and efficiently format things into text or octet 
> strings and internationalization support. These two tasks are attempted 
> to be solved by the current C++ IO implementation, but the attempt is 
> suboptimal in various ways.

Well, there is also the lowest-level task, which is actually the primary
task to be addressed by the new I/O library, of providing a general
stream framework that supports bytes, arbitrary character encodings, and
(as I think it should) arbitrary POD types even.  This stream framework
should include common filters, like converting between character
encodings and newline conversion.  Thus, the task of converting from
e.g. a stream of UTF-16 encoded uint16_t to e.g. a stream of iso-8859-1
uint8_t is completely separate from the issue of formatting text.

[snip]

> Meantime, I can see now that we're heading a bit off-topic from the 
> original post, since the initial discussion began on a new IO 
> architecture proposal, which is a bit aside from the problems I 
> mentioned above. Sorry, Sebastian.

I don't think it is entirely off topic, simply because it may be best
for the text formatting facilities to be designed to output to any
stream (where by stream I mean stream as defined by the new I/O library,
which could, but need not, be constructed on top of a string), and
similarly, the text parsing facilities should be designed to read from
an arbitrary stream.

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard