On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 7:05 AM, Edward Diener <eldiener@tropicsoft.com>wrote:
I am much less against additional macro names than you are. I see nothing wrong with a well-documented and large API, with a programmer understanding what has to be used for what needed functionality.
I think the therein lies the concern: a large API makes it more difficult for the programmer to understand what is and is not relevant for the task at hand. Having the MTFC macros does not hurt anything. There is no reason to not
supply them purely as a convenience.
The reason not to supply them is that it contributes unnecessarily to API bloat. If Boost.TypeTraits supplied metafunction classes for all its metafunctions, I bet people would be making noise :) Regarding comments about, e.g., a literature search and an exhaustive comparison between other libraries (I'll refrain from quoting), it would be nice, and the more we know what we can do and cannot do with respect to non-intrusive compile-time introspection, the better. It's something that should be seamlessly addable in the future if deemed important enough. - Jeff