Michael Caisse wrote:
I've been trying to think of when I might use such a library. Without the symmetry (input as well as output) I can think of few instances where this functionality might come in handy. Other than potential debug output, what else do you envision? What am I missing?
I'm also finding little improvement over the following example based on your samples. Here I am using Karma to produce the same output as Explore. It is a bit more verbose; however, it is infinitely more flexible. ... // lets do some containers in containers std::vector<std::vector<int> > vvi; vvi.push_back(vi); vvi.push_back(vi); std::cout << format('[' << *( '[' << (stream % ", " ) << ']' ) << ']' , vvi);
I surely would not like to write the above any time I need to dump std::vector for debugging. And I suspect that the effect on compilation time would also be somewhat different. In other words, I think there's definitely a place for an inflexible library that just works. - Volodya