On 6/10/06, Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
There are two defaults we might like:
(1) alignment defaults to unaligned. (2) num_bytes defaults to sizeof(T)
[ Snip lots more discussion ]
I've been working on Yuval's idea, and in doing so came up with a different interface that I'll describe here, as it deals with the issues mentioned here in a different way. (This is not the exact one I've implemented, I've adjusted some things to fit closer with what's been discussed here.) I've basically inverted some of the things. Instead of having num_bytes default to sizeof(T), why not have T default to some type based on num_bytes? Boost.Integer already provides an elegant interface for doing this. This requires an extra template parameter to specify signedness, but I don't think that's a problem. For one, it means that the T parameter is unneeded, so it's not increasing the number of parameters anyways. It means that the type can default to signed, "as the ints do", and the signed and unsigned keywords are valid arguments to a type template parameter, which I think is a fairly elegant interface. As for alignment, might there ever be a need to have alignment at something other than num_bytes? If the storage is done in an anonymous union of the char array and some type where sizeof(Align_T)==align_bytes, then you can allow attempted alignment at any number of bytes. Allowing aligned and unaligned as arguments would also be easy. If unaligned has the value 1, then defaulting to unaligned makes the Align_T a char, which has no effect on the alignment. aligned could be given a value of 0, for which the implementation would pick T as the Align_T. Examples: little-endian, 3 bytes, signed, unaligned: endian<little,3> little-endian, 5 bytes, unsigned, unaligned: endian<little,5,unsigned> big-endian, 4 bytes, signed, 4-byte aligned: endian<big,4,signed,aligned> big-endian, 2 bytes, unsigned, 4-byte aligned: endian<big,2,unsigned,4> This would, however, modifying (or implementing a clone of) Boost.Integer to add support for long long or __int64_t or similar, where available, but I think that would be a worthwhile project anyways.
Thanks for all the comments,
Thanks for bringing it up in the first place, ~ Scott McMurray