Zeljko Vrba wrote:
And now, the last sentence brings us back to square one: me trying to understand what MPL and fusion are / could be good for and with you jumping right into the middle of my discussion with Istvan, and you becoming (seemingly at least) frustrated with trying to help me when I never even explicitly asked for help -- it was a question about real-world usage!
Sorry for jumping in the middle of your discussion with Istvan. Pardon me if I seemed frustrated.
Anyway, Dave has already recommended Stepanov's slides. Can you please (yes, *now* I'm asking for help :-)) recommend something else that explains generic programming in C++ [*] and which is not so verbose that it uses several pages and examples to explain why does an adaptable unary function need the "result_type" typedef. (This was just an example, and *not* a reference to Stepanov's slides.. just to give you an idea about what kind of text I'm after.) There's a bunch of papers at Stepanov's site, but what to read and in which order to read it?
[*] My basic mistake is, I guess, drawing parallels with ML. Generic programming in C++ is (obviously?) sufficiently different / harder that analogies do not work well.
IMO, there's nothing hard in GP. It's just a different way of doing things. C++ is multiparadigm. You can do FP, OOP, GP all at the same time. The Stepanov site is a goldmine of information about the subject. Just be patient. There's a good reason why the examples need to explain "result_type". I reckon you can skip the part if you are already familiar with it. Alas, I don't know which to recommend reading first. The papers are listed by date, more or less giving you a historical perspective. I'd also recommend Doug Gregor's "An Introduction to Generic Programming" http://www.generic-programming.org/about/intro/ and his talk on Concept C++: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1790714981047186825 If you like patterns as I do, I find this one enjoyable: http://www.coldewey.com/europlop2000/papers/geraud+duret.zip and of course: http://www.boost.org/community/generic_programming.html well, those are just a few. HTH, FWIW. Regards, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boostpro.com http://spirit.sf.net