Re: [boost] gsoc project

Subject: Re: [boost] gsoc project
From: Scott McMurray (me22.ca+boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-03-30 20:34:05

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 09:57, Paul A. Bristow <pbristow_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> But there are *some* similarities between the two.
> (Often you feed a string and you get a 'check' be it a single 4 bit digit,
> or a loadsabits digest?).
>

Conceptually, I agree.

But since the point of check digits is to find human-entry errors, the
trade-offs and practical issues are totally different.

For example, they only make sense for things short enough that a human
would be willing to type, so having an interface that encourages
sequentially providing 4-KiB blocks of unsigned chars makes no sense.

Similarly, a human has provided it manually, so passing it as a
wstring is a reasonable, performance-mostly-unimportant thing to do,
compared to how long it took the user to type it.  Especially since
the checker might need to consider whether the ISBN-10 was entered
with 'X', 'x', 'х' (Cyrillic ha), 'Ｘ' (fullwidth), or 'ｘ' (fullwidth).

~ Scott