Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
BTW: this interface above is easily implementable on top of Spirit. It's just a thin wrapper around existing functionality. And I already expressed my opinion that any high level conversion library should be built on top of Spirit - a proven, fast, reliable, versatile, and mature parser and generator framework. Anything else leads to code duplication, inconsistencies, implementation flaws, you name it. Converting a string of digits into an integer might seem to be an easy task. But it's not. It's tricky, error prone, and difficult to get correct _and_ fast at the same time.
I think the barrier to adoption is the size of the Spirit library and its dependencies. For example, I'd be afraid to write a small library that forces my users to depend on Proto, MPL, and Fusion too. That, IMO, is too much to ask. People might not be aware though that Spirit is very modular. The numeric parsing/generating utilities are in fact just a couple of small *independent* header files. It might be a good idea to fully decouple them from Spirit into, say, Boost.Utilities. This is becoming more pertinent now that more people are needing them. Indeed, parsing and generating numbers is not easy. Make no mistake. Regards, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boostpro.com http://spirit.sf.net