Thorsten Ottosen wrote:
On 02-11-2012 07:11, Robert Ramey wrote:
c) Another really annoying thing is that every thing is directly in the boost namespace. This breaks the convention that library headers are in boost/<library name> and in the namespace boost::<library name>. This creates a lot of opportunity for conflict. Maybe so, but how would you change that without breaking code? No question that fixing this would break existing code.
The real question is whether making this change would be worth breaking code.
a) The breakage in users of range wouldn't be a big deal in my opinion. Just rebuild the ap and fix the compilation errors. This is not an option IMHO. b) Making such a change would be a fairly big job - not a tweak. Of course this is not a big concern to me as I wouldn't be doing the job. I agree that while possible, this will take a lot of time.
Here are a few miscelaneous personal observations on the range library
a) To me, the range library/concept is not appreciated to the extent it should be. I don't think that potential users appreciate the utility of being able to compose adaptors. I think the documentation would benefit from more examples. How do you know what potential users appreciate or not. Almost any Boost library could improve its documentation I I think some of them are already doing it.
b) The documentation is pretty regular - I like this. But each page needs a small example to help clarify things. See fusion library for an example.
c) I'm not crazy about the '|' syntax - OK I'm out voted here but I don't have to use it so I don't have any real objection. Here we agree ;-)
d) When I've used the library - I've found that I've had to spelunk through the code to understand how to "make it work". Of course now I don't recall the specific cases other than the one which motivated this post, but they are common. I believe that more examples and tests would smoke these out. I'm sure that if you post here the specific example that was confusing,
Le 02/11/12 17:54, Robert Ramey a écrit : the authors will try to correct it.
e) Somethings are not quite right - the thing that motivated this post is the confluence of containers and ranges. There might be other things.
What do you mean?
I believe that this library could have a big future but that it needs more work to "get it right". I think Boost.Range is an excellent library and that a lot of people are already taking advantage of it. This raises the question of how such work should get done. Of course this situation apply's to many libraries.
We agree again. Robert, I understand that you would like to see a lot of Boost libraries improved but that you can not do too much as you have a lot of work maintaining your own library. This is the case for most of the Boost library authors. Best, Vicente