Re: [Boost-users] [serialization]

David Abrahams wrote:

"Robert Ramey" writes:

...

As an aside, note that the serialization library contains STRONG_TYPE which was needed to implement the library. Its good enough for the serialization library but probably not up to "industrial strength". May some enterprising individual might want to take a look at this with the idea of make an "industrial strengh boost version"

There is no way to make such a thing "industrial strength" in today's C++, for most people's definition of "strong typedef". In fact, the one in the serialization library isn't anything like a typedef, and it's nothing like what most people mean when they say "strong typedef". It's merely a wrapper over an instance of some type that can be implicitly converted to that instance. A "strong typedef" wouldn't even necessarily have that implicit conversion -- in fact, eliminating those implicit conversions is one of the main reason some people want direct language support for strong typedefs.

What I needed was a type that had the functioning of say an unsigned integer but was of a distinguishable type. What do other people mean when the say they want a strong typedef? Robert Ramey