On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 14:52 -0500, christopher diggins wrote:
Well I am still on the fence whether I even want to use the wiki (I don't like the possibility of my comments being moved or erased), so I'll still make some comments here on the mailing list.
Ok; I'll summarize and add them to the page, as I did with the other mails. Hope it's ok with you. In fact, I think that it'd be good to keep it as a document rather than a repository for emails. That way, most of it could easily end up in the final BoostBook documentation.
I have some more comment operator overloading: I can sympathize with the desire to keep with tradition of shell notation, but in a programming language we have types which completely negates the need for three separate operators. In a shell, the three separate operators ( >, <, | ) are used by the shell to decide how to interpret the different arguments. However this is not needed in a (mostly) typed programming language like C++ because the type indicates how each symbol should behave in an expression.
Writing code like:
b | c > d < a;
IMO just looks weird in C++ and is going to surprise everyone who is unfamiliar with traditional shell syntax, which is a very fast growing group of relatively young programmers who can't really be ignored.
I see absolutely no reason to not move to something which is inherently more logical like:
a > b > c > d
Hmm indeed, much clearer. Any special reason about why you used the '>' operator in the example? I'm wondering if '|' could make sense (from the shell), although it doesn't implicitly reflect a "direction". Or what about '>>'? One could think of a process' pipeline as a stream (I think that would make sense if one considers the concepts of Source, Sink and Filter from Boost.Iostreams).
Anyway, I am very pleased to see you taking the initiative on this project Julio.
You're welcome. I'm quite motivated to work on this ATM, although my free time has radically decreased (got back to university this week). Anyway, I'll try to do what I can, but no promises. Cheers, -- Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com> http://www.livejournal.com/users/jmmv/ The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/