On 13/05/05, Arne Vogel
The article you linked to doesn't mention typedefs, it's about the alleged harmfulness of exceptions (and it seems poor Joel just didn't understand Resource Acquisition is Initialization in C++ or try-finally in Java/C#).
As quite a number of people are mentioning in his forum =)
Am I right to assume that with "strong typedef" you mean something like a typedef, but where each identifier defined in this way is an actual type and not just an alias?
That's the idea, yes. The idea is to make it so that assigning an unsafe_string to a safe_string ( yes, the names are vague, but they're from the article ) either invalid or cause an applicable transformation function to be called so the resulting safe_string isn't unsafe, despite both being basically just a std::string I started a topic on Joel's forum about it that includes a preliminary, but working, version of the class and an ( oversimplified ) example use case. It's at http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.126259.24 if you're interested. I'd also appreciate some design and/or implementation feedback if anyone does check it out. As mentioned, it's my first try at creating a sort of policy-based ( if that's the correct term ) class as well as my first time using boost's SFINAE tools. Regards, Scott McMurray