Hi Beman, apologies for the very late reply. I postponed it and then always forgot :(
AFAICR, the question never came up. I can't remember why I started calling it filesystem rather than file_system, but suspect I was influenced by other material I read at the time. Try googling for "filesystem", and you can see some examples.
Seen. Both forms are common; at the moment, though, Google's search results for "file system" (in quotes) are almost twice as much those for filesystem (about 60,000,000 vs. 30,000,000). Any hope for it to become "file_system"?
That said, the wording at the url you provide still perplexes me:
Type system_error_type [now sysno_t] is the implementation-defined type used by the operating system to report error codes.
[...]
It is whatever the operating system's API uses to report errors. If there is a layer between the C++ program and the operating system, like cygwin, it is what that middle layer's API exposes.
Ok. So the wording needs some tweak (I know it is difficult to do in standardese, sorry for that).
My preferred name, FWIW, is still native_system_error[_type].
Seems too wordy to me.
Now that you told about middle layers being considered, what about "system_api_error"? Or should it necessarily have _t/_type at the end?
[...]
I'm not seeing how this applies to class error code (which does not use strings at all), unless you are suggesting that stream inserters and extractors be provided.
I'm a bit lost in all the renaming we have done so far :) Anyhow, at the url you provided: <http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2006/n1975.html#Diagnostics-library> the class system_error has the following constructor: system_error(const std::string & what_arg, error_code ec);
[snipped suggestion to file a full paper]
I'm not sure which constructors you are looking at. The only converting constructor I see is already explicit.
As I said I was only looking at the online document; there error_code(system_error_type err); is not declared explicit. -- [ Gennaro Prota, C++ developer for hire ] [ resume: available on request ]