On 7/15/06, Alberto Ganesh Barbati <abarbati@iaanus.com> wrote:
Thanks for the explanation.
My pleasure. Thanks for taking the time to ask the very important questions. :)
Your two hints about validation/routing being optional makes me think that you think I am objecting those concepts. Contrariwise, I do think the concepts of validation/routing are interesting *per se*. Those concepts can of course be applied to dispatching (or retrieving/calling runtime functions, or whatever you prefer to call that) but have a much more general value, IMHO.
I agree with you on this -- it seems like they themselves are very handy concepts and implementing a common and reusable/extensible interface for validation and routing along with a more generic associative container are very interesting to implement indeed.
For example, here's my use case: I am writing a videogame and I need to load a lot of texture images from disk files. Of course I don't want to load the same image twice. A simple map where the key is the file pathname is not a good tool, because there may be different pathnames pointing to the same file. Let's assume that using some kind of canonical form of pathnames is sufficient to uniquely identify the file. So my "routing" step is a conversion from a pathname to its canonical form. My "validation" step is a check that the file actually exists and identifies a supported image format. See? A container like the one you described could be very useful to me, yet I am going to store objects which are not functions nor related in any ways to functions.
Does it make sense?
Yes, this makes a lot of sense. It seems like the dispatcher concept in itself can exist separately or along with the validator+router+associative_container concepts. Definitely it makes a lot of sense to have an implementation such as what you are suggesting, and it looks like I already have some code work with to come up with something generally useful -- aside from the dispatcher. Thanks very much for the ideas! :) -- Dean Michael C. Berris C/C++ Software Architect Orange and Bronze Software Labs http://3w-agility.blogspot.com/ http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com/ Mobile: +639287291459 Email: dean [at] orangeandbronze [dot] com