On Jul 9, 2011, at 10:20 AM, Vicente Botet <vicente.botet@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
Jeroen Habraken wrote:
Colour me curious, but what's the advantage of wrapping boost.coerce in boost.conversion? We're trying to create a sensible API for boost.coerce (which, as we've seen, is quite a challenge for a conversion library) and I personally do not see the benefit of it being wrapped with a different API in a different library.
If you know that one of your types is string, then there would be no reason to use something more generic than Coerce or lexical_cast. However in generic programming it sometimes comes up that you need to convert from type X to type Y and you don't care whether either is a string.
The scope of Boost.Conversion is not to define specific conversions but allow to put all the basic type-to-type conversion using a generic interface. If Boost.Coerce provide an string to type efficient conversion Boost.Conversion can provide a specialization for string to types conversion that will delegate to Boost.Coerce. At the end std::string is a type as others.
Another interesting example of using Conversion along with Coerce is e.g. convert pair<string, string> to pair<int, int> If formatting options are required, I don't think there is any good way to convert between pair<int, string> and pair<string, int>. But that's got to be pretty rare.