Scott Woods wrote:
IIUC, the example above appears to be an example of a "header reader" that can be used at runtime to switch code paths inside the application. Yep, that's what it is. Imagine you have an application that saves its configuration in a file using the I/O chain library. You decide that the encoding will be binary to discourage users from fiddling. You further decide that users arent so bad and that an advanced tab will let them switch between binary encoding, XML and others. It might allow for easy exchange of configurations within a user community.
That sounds like completely changing the serialization format of the configuration. I don't think my streams are going to help you much there. A binary structured format and XML are completely different things. You can implement both on top of my streams, sure, but beyond that I think you're left with having to replace the entire serializer component. That means switch or virtual functions. Virtuals would be a better solution here, I think. Sebastian