On 4/11/06, David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> wrote:
What is the rationale for using the word "property" here?
Why is this data structure not a more generic tree? It seems as though forcing the data on a tree node to be a specialization of basic_string is needlessly limiting.
Perhaps the use of std::string is needlessly limiting, but what makes the property_tree a little bit different than a generic tree container is the concept that child nodes are associated with a key, and there are convenience methods provided for finding nodes by their "path" in the tree. The same effect could perhaps be accomlished using (hypothetically) a generic_tree<std::pair<std::string, std::string> >, but this would need to in turn be wrapped in another interface to achieve the same ease-of-use. -- Caleb Epstein caleb dot epstein at gmail dot com