[boost] Re: Formal review of "Output Formatters" library begins today

Roland Richter wrote:

...

I've made a noise about this in the past. I strongly believe that current lexical_cast behaviour does not play nice with existing stream operators (which are commonly written to assume whitespace is skipped). There's no good reason for that, and lexical_cast should not use the "noskipws" flag.

Do you happen to know why it was introduced then in the first place?

Not really. IIRC, Kevlin Henney said he finds it is more clear when lexical_cast is required to consume the entire input, without skipping whitespace at the beginning. I don't understand this argument at all, and the new behaviour only creates practical issues :-( - Volodya