Re: [boost] [review] Formal review period for VMD library begins today, Aug 21, and ends Sat, Aug 30

Subject: Re: [boost] [review] Formal review period for VMD library begins today, Aug 21, and ends Sat, Aug 30
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-08-21 21:24:50

On 8/21/2014 7:53 PM, Niall Douglas wrote:
> On 21 Aug 2014 at 9:33, Edward Diener wrote:
>
>> On 8/21/2014 8:30 AM, Niall Douglas wrote:
>>> On 20 Aug 2014 at 22:26, Steven Watanabe wrote:
>>>
>>>> The formal review of the VMD library by Edward Diener
>>>> starts today, Aug 21st and is scheduled to continue until Aug 30th.
>>>
>>> Is there not the documentation on a website instead of inside a code
>>> repo?
>>
>> http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/eldiener/variadic_macro_data/master/doc/html/index.html
>
> Firstly that viewer kept failing for me, so I gave up quite quickly.

What failure do you get ? Maybe I can reproduce it.

OTOH if you choose to clone the library in your modularboost/libs/vmd 
the top-level index.html link should work perfectly.

>
> However from what I read I ask this: why is this library useful?

The introduction explains in general the functionality in the library 
that would make it useful. Did you read the introduction ?

> What
> problems does it solve?

Does a library have to solve specific problems to be used by others ? 
The usefulness of a library is that you can do things with it that would 
be much harder to hand-craft without it.

I may have not made too much of an issue in the documentation, although 
I did devote a section to it toward the end of the documentation ( see 
'Input as dynamic types' ), but the general "problem" it solves is being 
able to write macros where, within the constraints of the types which 
the library can parse, you can take different paths as far as output 
generaation depending on the type of any particular macro input. You can 
therefore design macros to be more flexible than you might ordinarily have.