Re: [boost] Boost.Conversion - pre review request

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost.Conversion - pre review request
From: Vicente Botet (vicente.botet_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-07-09 09:51:11

Jeroen Habraken wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On 9 July 2011 04:10, Gordon Woodhull <gordon_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> Hi Vicente, all,
>>
>>> I've been reworking the Boost.Conversion library
>>>
>>> Documentation:
>>> http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/conversion/libs/conversion_ext/doc/html/index.html
>>> Sandbox :http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/conversion/
>>
>>
>>> Description:
>>> Boost.Conversion manages with generic extrinsic conversion between
>>> unrelated
>>> types. These conversion can be seen as implicit or explicit conversions.
>>
>> I am excited to manage the Conversion review at the end of August.
>>
>> It may be simple enough for us to say "extrinsic type-to-type conversion"
>> since we both participated in the Boost.Convert review and have all those
>> distinctions in mind...
>>
>> But it might be confusing to potential reviewers and followers of Boost
>> that in other "little c" conversion news this year:
>> * lexical_cast has received a new maintainer who is adding optimizations
>> for type-to-type which overlap with Conversion
>> * Vladimir Batov's Boost.Convert was withdrawn. Â I think it's fair to Ed
>> Diener's excellent review report [1] to say that the library was not
>> acceptable in its current form not because it didn't have the right
>> features, but mostly because of syntax problems. Â And because of
>> confusion that its scope overlapped with lexical_cast, which I'm trying
>> to avoid in the upcoming review!
>> * Jeroen Habraken is working on a Boost.Coerce library [2] which does
>> more runtime-efficient string-to-type and type-to-string conversion using
>> Spirit.
>>
>> One clear distinction is that the proposed Boost.Conversion is not
>> concerned with the special cases of string-to-type and type-to-string.
>> Â It provides a general framework for type-to-type conversion and will
>> defer string conversions to lexical_cast or coerce depending how it is
>> configured.
>>
>> IMHO lexical_cast is not the appropriate generic function to use for
>> type-to-type conversion (when there is no text involved), and I am
>> managing the review to evaluate whether Boost.Conversion is the right
>> solution.
>>
>> Boost.Conversion learns from the use cases that were presented by
>> Vladimir Batov in Boost.Convert and its review, and IIUC it now provides
>> all the behaviors that were not string-specific, without the syntax
>> problems. Â Obviously, that also means no operator<<, so there's no way to
>> specify formatting options if text is involved. Â (Jeroen, if you're
>> reading this, can you convert to/from e.g. hexadecimal with Coerce?)
> 
> It isn't possible at the moment but it is to be re-added during the
> Google Summer of Code. The syntax will probably look something like
> coerce::as<int>("0x17", tag::hex());
> 
> ...
> 
> If there are any questions regarding Coerce, please don't hesitate to
> contact me either on- or off-list.
> 
> 

Hi,

I don't see why we need to specify that the format is hexadecimal. I would
expect that the spirit grammar associated to the coerce library will take
care of all the formats without any specific additional tag.

I see only a need for tags/manipulators when you want to convert an int to a
string as you can have only one default behavior. Do you expect to have best
performances with coerce than using an string stream for type to string
conversions?
 
Best,
Vicente 

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