Re: [boost] Proposal: Add Loki Library's SafeFormat to Boost:

Subject: Re: [boost] Proposal: Add Loki Library's SafeFormat to Boost:
From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-01-01 20:57:20

on Thu Jan 01 2009, Joel de Guzman <joel-AT-boost-consulting.com> wrote:

> Robert Ramey wrote:
>> Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
>>> You might think, well Spirit used to be a parser library, not
>>> something usable for output formatting. But with the event of Spirit
>>> V2 this has changed. Spirit V2 now is not only a parser generator
>>> library anymore (Spirit Classic, aka V1.x, now called Spirit.Qi), but
>>> got extended to cover the domain of (output) generators as well
>>> (Spirit.Karma). Admittedly, the docs are not complete yet, but if you
>>> know how to build a parser using Spirit.Qi you shouldn't have
>>> problems using Spirit.Karma either. Everything is in the SVN (and in
>>> Boost V1.37, BTW) and the examples should provide a fairly good
>>> starting point.
>>
>> I wish you guys could appreciate how all this name changing makes
>> things much more difficult for us poor library users.
>>
>> The fact that names are in no way descriptive is another huge time
>> waster.
>
> Just curious. How much time did you waste before you realize
> that Boost.Spirit was a parser? Can you explain why it is a
> "huge time waster"? IMO, it takes a second to know, while
> browsing http://www.boost.org/doc/libs, that Spirit is a parser.

True, but once you learn that, if there are 4-5 sublibraries that also
have non-mnemonic names, it does start to look pretty confusing.

>> Now you want to mix in another facility?  At least I know (Or think I
>> know) what spirit was intended to be used for.  Now I'm not so sure.
>> If this is a new facitity - wouldn't Boost custom/rules require that
>> it be subjected a new review?
>
> Where is this custom/rules and when did this it start to apply?

There are no such rules.  There's nothing wrong with extending the
functionality of a library.  Obviously, tacking the functionality of the
filesystem library onto Boost.Python wouldn't make sense, but I think
parsing and generation may be a bit more related than that ;-)

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com