Reece Dunn wrote:
John Torjo wrote:
Dear boosters,
There's been quite a hot debate about "Output Formatters" library.
Reece has provided some input facilies in this library as well. This has drawn people to either sides: some don't want these input facilities, while others do.
To conclude, I would like to ask you to vote: - "Yes" - in favor of Input facilities - "No" - don't want Input facilities.
My personal vote is "No". Please share your own.
I don't know if I am allowed to vote here, but I would like to point out a few things:
[1] The library provides operator << (output) for STL containers. Thus, you can do:
ss << vec;
If input facilities were not provided, you couldn't do:
ss >> vec; // oops! operator >> not defined for std::vector<...>
NOTE: You would then need to implement these facilities using Boost.Spirit which will add a dependency on that library.
[2] The direct result of not supporting [1] is that you cannot utilize Roland Richter's usage:
std::list<char> cl = lexical_cast< std::list<char> >( "[ a, b, c ]" );
[3] Input and output operations are symmetric operations. Why provide output for std::complex if you don't provide input?
When they're symmetric, I can use [serialize]. The thing is that when I want pretty output, I want your library. When I do pretty output, I really don't expect to read it back. For a lot of cases when I do pretty output, there is no safe way to read it back. Best, John -- John Torjo -- john@torjo.com Contributing editor, C/C++ Users Journal -- "Win32 GUI Generics" -- generics & GUI do mix, after all -- http://www.torjo.com/win32gui/ -- v1.4 - save_dlg - true binding of your data to UI controls! + easily add validation rules (win32gui/examples/smart_dlg)