Re: [boost] Rave for proposed Boost.Local (functions)

Subject: Re: [boost] Rave for proposed Boost.Local (functions)
From: Gregory Crosswhite (gcross_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-02-02 17:41:50

On 02/01/2011 11:00 PM, Thomas Heller wrote:
> I would be interested in what limitations you ran into using Boost.Lambda
> and if you are aware of the recent efforts that were put into Boost.Phoenix?

I ran into two problems specifically.  The first was that my functions 
had just over three arguments.  The second was that I wanted my function 
to have a nested function inside of it --- that is, another closure that 
it could pass to an STL algorithm such as for_each --- and although I 
saw that this was doable in principle I couldn't figure out how to make 
it work even though I could have sworn I was following the 
documentation, and the error messages gave me no insight at all into 
what I was doing wrong.

Also, one of the things that I really liked about Boost.Local was that I 
didn't have to figure out how to cram what I wanted into special 
syntax;  after writing the boiler-plate to create the closure function, 
I could program in normal C++ syntax, which made life easy.

I hadn't looked at the latest version of Phoenix until just now, so I 
didn't realize that so much had changed --- thank you very much for 
directing my attention towards it!  It looks like it might actually fit 
the bill for most of my uses, so when I get a chance I will experiment 
with using it to replace Boost.Local in my code.  There are some cases 
where the function body is sufficiently non-trivial that translating 
everything into the special syntax of Phoenix might be a pain, but I 
could very well be wrong.  I'll let you know what I think about how how 
well it solves the problem I faced versus Boost.Local after I've tried 
it out.

Cheers,
Greg