Christopher Jefferson wrote:
On 18 Feb 2009, at 22:16, Andrey Semashev wrote:
But I will lose generic ostreamability for my class then. Sorry, I just don't see any advantages for differently named functions.
I find differently named functions important for readability and correctness, particularly in templated generic code.
Wouldn't it be easy to add 'to' and 'from' functions as simple wrappers around 'convert', for those who want them?
Well, such wrappers may be added, if wanted. But I don't think it should be the main interface of the library. Such wrappers would have a more narrow range of use cases, presumably, "to-string" and "from-string" conversions. For other kinds of conversions the terms "to" and "from" are really meaningless.