Re: [boost] [lexical_cast] A suggestion

Subject: Re: [boost] [lexical_cast] A suggestion
From: Sebastian Redl (sebastian.redl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-02-08 17:48:01

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Sun Feb 08 2009, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> David Abrahams wrote:
>>     
>>> That's not my concern.  My concern is that I don't think lexical_cast is
>>> a particularly good interface for its main uses, which could be thought
>>> of as "to-string" and "from-string."
>>>       
>> I disagree. lexical_cast was designed to be simple to use, and I think it does it very
>> well. The "to-string" and "from-string" conversions, in their simple form, are just
>> corner cases. 
>>     
>
> Eh?  What other uses has it got?!
>
>   
>> If I want to simply parse an int, I don't want to make up a Spirit
>> grammar for that or even use scanf. 
>>     
>
> scanf is *way* lighter weight that lexical_cast.
>
>   
>> I need a C++-style of strtol, which is safe in
>> terms of buffer allocation and types. 
>>     
>
> So write that.
>
>   
>> This is what lexical_cast tries to achieve and it does, to some
>> degree. I don't know of any other tools that come this close to this
>> goal, neither in Boost, nor outside of it.
>>     
>
> So write one (just my opinion).  lexical_cast means something very
> strange and overly-general, and we should write something targeted at
> the real-world uses people actually have.
>   
Perhaps someone could simply implement the C++0x s2* and to_string
functions as described in the draft, 21.4 Numeric Conversions? They're
pretty trivial, and sufficient for all numeric use cases. They don't
work with user-defined types, though.

Sebastian