First, Hats off to Doug for great work yet again. :-) Doug: still looking forward to that blog... :-) On 8/8/06, Bronek Kozicki <brok@spamcop.net> wrote:
Besides things that are rather obvious (builtin support for typelists, "typesafe printf", much improved forwarding, construction of heterogeneous collections) I wonder if it might be first step towards opening C++ to yet another programming paradigm - functional. Anyone here to investigate it?
I had recently been looking into implementing my own "yet another functional programming library" for my personal understanding, and I definitely think variadic templates will help a lot in making truly generic (and not so preprocessor dependent) functional programming libraries. That said, it's a library, not really a language extension (I don't have the powers Doug has with regards to compiler hacking). Having said this, there are already a number of functional programming libraries out there for C++ -- mainly for creating lambda expressions used with STL predicates and functors. The best (or most I've read about) I've seen so far is Phoenix (I think to be released as Phoenix 2 and made part of Boost sometime in the future). It certainly should be worthwhile to implement language extensions to allow for truly functional programming in C++. However, for now I'd like to think a library implementation would suffice (albeit with considerable amount of work). So the short answer to your question is, yes there are people looking into functional programming for C++. I personally am very interested in such an effort, and <shameless plug>have been blogging a lot about it</shameless plug>. -- Dean Michael C. Berris C++ Software Architect Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co. web: http://software.orangeandbronze.com/ email: dean@orangeandbronze.com mobile: +63 928 7291459 phone: +63 2 8943415 other: +1 408 4049532 blogs: http://mikhailberis.blogspot.com http://3w-agility.blogspot.com http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com