"Matthias Schabel" <boost@schabel-family.org> wrote
I'm not familiar with compile-time GUIDs - where is this discussed?
I don't believe it was discussed -- this is just a thought. Windows (at least) has a tool (guidgen) that can be used to generate a unique 128-bit number. This is (or was) used extensively in COM. When you run the tool, you get something like: // {0E6AE480-9AE6-4f04-A24E-ABEAA55BB49A} static const GUID <<name>> = { 0xe6ae480, 0x9ae6, 0x4f04, { 0xa2, 0x4e, 0xab, 0xea, 0xa5, 0x5b, 0xb4, 0x9a } }; (you are supposed to paste this into your COM code, and give it a name, to get a globally-unique 128-bit number) If we define a template like: template<int n0, short n1, short n2, char n3, ..., char n10> struct guid; then we can use generated text to instantiate this template: typedef guid<0xe6ae480, 0x9ae6, 0x4f04, 0xa2, 0x4e, 0xab, 0xea, 0xa5, 0x5b, 0xb4, 0x9a> my_guid; Here we got a 128 bit compile-time universally-unique number. It's quite easy to define a compile-time less_then operation on such GUIDs. Regards, Arkadiy