On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 6:43 AM, Neil Groves <neil@grovescomputing.com>wrote:
Boosters,
I am considering my position on this patch. I can see that it is pleasant syntactic sugar, but the reason I consciously omitted this was that it suffers from combinatorial explosion. I feel that one of the nice aspects of the current Boost.Range design is that it reduces combinatorial explosion by breaking down items into their constituent orthogonal parts.
However I am reconsidering since there are a growing number of people requesting this feature, and perhaps the pragmatic convenience outweighs the slightly theoretical design concern. I need to make some effort to tackle some of the Boost.Range suggestions that have been accumulating during a period of ill health. I apologize for slow responses. It is important, to me, to make interface changes that I do not later regret. This needs some further investigation and thought.
My unrequested opinion: First, I understand the motivation. However, I think it would be inconsistent and confusing if some libraries in Boost treated pointers-to-member-functions specially while others did not. And I don't see all of Boost moving to specially support pointers-to-member-functions. Also, the workaround is seriously really not so bad (explicitly wrapping with mem_fn), especially given C++'s general penchant for verbosity. My 2c, - Jeff