On Oct 19, 2012, at 11:03 PM, Gennadiy Rozenal wrote:
It's been a long while since I merged any changes into boost release and by now there are whole bunch of new features there. Some are small, but some others are big ones such that they can change the way people use the library. I'd like to list them here (excluding bug fixes and removal of deprecated interfaces) and ask what should we do with these. Specifically let me know if you think these require some kind of (mini) review from community, but any other comments are welcome as well.
Excellent stuff! Thanks for this work. I have a couple of comments. First, __please__ pay attention to documentation. I know you have said that documentation isn't something you like/want to do, but a library without good documentation is useful only to the writer. In other words, it is (in a general purpose case like this) simply a waste of time. Second, I have below suggested some terminology changes. (Not for BOOST_CHECKA -- you have plenty of input on that.) Some believe that a name is only a name, but I disagree. Choosing names carefully is, in my opinion, a powerful means of communication and documentation.
II. New "data driven test case" subsystem
<<snip>>
d) join - dataset constructed by joining 2 datasets of the same type
int a[] = {1,2,3}; int b[] = {7,8,9}; data::make(a) + data::make(b) - dataset with 6 integer values
This should be called "concatenation", not "joining". People with a database background will expect something called "join" to increase the arity of the result.
e) zip - dataset constructed by zipping 2 datasets of the same size, but not necessarily the same type
This dataset has an arity which is sum of argument dataset arities.
int a[] = {1,2,3}; char* b[] = {"qwe", "asd", "zxc"};
data::make(a) ^ data::make(b) dataset with 3 samples which are pairs of int and char*.
Calling this "zipping" is odd (at least to me). Makes it sound like a compression facility. Perhaps "tupling" would be better. I also think the choice of operator here is not ideal. How does the xor operator evoke any notion of this operation? I would choose bitwise-or "|" because that is sometimes used as a flat-file column delimiter. (Actually, my favorite choice would be the comma operator to go along with the "tupling" terminology, but who am I to defy Scott Meyers' More Effective C++, Item 7?)
f) grid - dataset constructed by "multiplying" 2 datasets of the same different sizes and types type
This dataset has an arity which is sum of argument dataset arities.
int a[] = {1,2,3}; char* b[] = {"qwe", "asd"}; double c[] = {1.1, 2.2};
data::make(a) * data::make(b) * data::make(c) dataset with 12 samples which are tuples of int and char* and double.
For people with a database background, "cross product" is the obvious name for this. Calling it anything else is silly. Also, I think you mean that the arity is the *product* of the argument dataset arities. Thanks, Ian Emmons