"John Torjo" wrote:
The FORMAL Review of "Output Formatter" library begins today,
I briefly looked on the library and wrote down few notes. I am especially interested in point [4]. 1. Name of the library would be better changed. Hearing it for the first time I suspected something like variant on std::endl. 2. The first part of documentation should be what is purpose of the library. I guess in this case it is debugging and testing support, 100% cases. 3. The name 'formatob' is not very good. "naryfmt" etc is horrible. 4. There seems to be significant overlap with Boost.Serialization (I suspect outfm doesn't handle cyclic structures). It may or may not be possible to implement outfm functionality with special archive. Was this considered? 5. To support debugging I would like to see many more features: - ability to wrap long lines in pretty way - ability to indent outputed data when they are part of complex structure - ability to generate HTML as output (+ ability to fold/unfold big data structures using Javascript). - helper function generate_html_output_and_show_it_in_browser() - ability to diff two outputed data where applicable and produce some easy to read report, possibly helper function: generate_html_output_and_show_it_in_browser_together_with_diff_of_previous_d ata_from_here() - some time ago John Torjo designed SMART_ASSERT library. If this will make into Boost, outfm would be perfect complement for it. /Pavel