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

Subject: Re: [boost] Proposal: Add Loki Library's SafeFormat to Boost:
From: Sebastian Redl (sebastian.redl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-01-02 16:08:22

Robert Ramey wrote:
> 2) the fact that no one looking to see if boost had a safe
> formating library library would be expected to find "sprite::karma".
>   

I don't know about other people, but my method of discovering Boost was
reading through all the short descriptions on the library overview page
and filing them away in my mind, not looking at just the titles and
guessing what they're for. If I had to find a library for a specific
purpose, I'd do a search on the library overview page, which looks in
the descriptions too. So if I'm looking for a formatting library, I'll
go to the library overview, hit Ctrl+F and type "format", maybe hit F3
to find alternatives. I'm certainly not going to scroll over the page
scanning library names only.

Because even names derived from the actual use case often don't really
help. Would you know, without looking at the description, what Boost.Any
really is for? How about Boost.Assign? Does the name really say that
it's a library that gives you a very convenient syntax for filling
containers? Let alone the initialism libraries like the MPL.
Most Boost libraries have simple and intuitive names, to their great
credit. But I really don't think that a beautiful name (and I think
Spirit's naming theme is beautiful) is any worse.

Sebastian