[boost] [string] --> [text] ?

Subject: [boost] [string] --> [text] ?
From: Gregory Crosswhite (gcross_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-27 17:47:24

Hey everyone,

Since there has been a lot of talk about what the name of a new 
immutable string class should be, may I toss the name "boost::text" into 
the ring?  The advantage of this name is that it explicitly conveys what 
it is meant for: working with human-readable text encoded in some 
implementation-specific form.  The name "string" would then continue to 
have its current interpretation as a string of contiguous 8-bit chars.

It has also been suggested that different classes be created for 
different UTF encodings.  I propose that boost::text have the internal 
encoding be an implementation (and potentially platform-specific) 
detail.  Since at the end of a serious of manipulations with the 
rope-like data structure one will have to do a final transformation to 
convert the text into a string of bytes anyway, that provides a natural 
point at which the desired encoding of the string of bytes can be 
specified.  That is, given a boost::text object "t", one could convert 
it into a UTF-8 string by calling "t.utf8_c_str()", a UTF-16 string by 
calling "t.utf16_c_str()", and so on, depending on what the underlying 
API is expecting.  Some of these calls might require recoding the text 
to a different encoding, so the internal encoding of boost::text could 
be optimized to whatever is most likely to be needed on that platform so 
that it is least likely to need recoding.  Alternatively, the encoding 
could be specified as a parameter to the constructor and be carried 
around as a runtime parameter since nobody needs to know what it is 
until the final encoding of the string.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Greg