On Apr 14, 2004, at 8:12 AM, David Abrahams wrote:
Not at all. This is not a std::set<> after all. It's well known that it has the semantics of an array. But maybe you should rename it bit_array or bit_vector instead of dynamic_bitset ;-)
Well, it's not entirely that clear cut. dynamic_bitset does have many aspects of a "set", in addition to many aspects of a container. From the docs:
The main problem that dynamic_bitset is designed to solve is that of representing a subset of a finite set. Each bit represents whether an element of the finite set is in the subset or not. As such the bitwise operations of dynamic_bitset, such as operator& and operator|, correspond to set operations, such as intersection and union.
dynamic_bitset is admittedly a little schizophrenic, which is due to inheriting its design from std::bitset. However, I don't think migrating far away from std::bitset is a good idea. If one wants a "pure" set interface, one can come up with a concept for a "set" and then add a layer that makes dynamic_bitset conform to that concept. Along these lines, one could have a free "empty_set" function. In short, I think empty() should not change, but only because that would also confuse users: users who are switching from std::bitset to dynamic_bitset. Cheers, Jeremy _______________________________________________ Jeremy Siek <jsiek@osl.iu.edu> http://www.osl.iu.edu/~jsiek Ph.D. Student, Indiana University Bloomington Graduating in August 2004 and looking for work C++ Booster (http://www.boost.org) _______________________________________________