[boost] Re: [Formal review] Collection Traits library

From: Thorsten Ottosen (nesotto_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-05-04 18:50:08

Hi Roland,

Thanks for your review.

| > - What is your evaluation of the documentation?
|
|   From the docs:
|
|    "It is worth noticing that some functionality requires partial template
|     specialization, in particular, full array support does"
|
|   It would be nice if the doc states in more detail *which* functions require
|   partial template specialization.

ok, its all functions and type-gerators for T[] when T is not char or wchar_t. I guess I should
just remove "some" and type "all".

|    "(remark: this is a very small problem since one would use boost::array<>
|     anyway)"
|
|   Well, if I knew the size of the array at compile-time; which brings me to

well, you always know the size of T[sz] at compile time.

|   What I miss is support for scoped_array<> and shared_array<>;
|   I guess, however, that it is difficult or even impossible to obtain the
|   number of elements of a shared_array<> - correct?

yes. Only strings are null-terminated.

|   Since other Boosters already gave more elaborate feedback on the design etc.,
|   I further focused on a special aspect of collection_traits.
|
|   My primary interest is the boost/view library (also in the sandbox).
|   Since views are meant to be lightweight wrappers with a collection-like
|   interface, they should work together with collection_traits - and, in
|   fact, all views submitted so far pass this test (see attached file).
|
|   I further noticed that one view (range_view) became obsolete, and
|   that other views might be easier to implement now with the help of
|   collection_traits.

great. If you are the man in charge of the view library, I think you should contact this Tom Houlder
 thoulder_at_[hidden] . He is working on something similar. You might also want to contact
John Torjo (john_at_[hidden]).

| template<class ContainerT>
| void test_container_traits_functions( ContainerT c )
| {

why are you passing by value?

|   boost::shared_array<int> sa( new int[7] );
|   //test_array_functions( sa ); // Wishful thinking.

not if the smart pointer would save its size and have a .size() function.

br

Thorsten