AMDG On 07/19/2012 03:35 PM, Fabio Fracassi wrote:
Hi Steven,
I am going through the documentation and simultaneously try out some things that weren't immediately obvious to me. When I came to the paragraph about composing concepts the last sentence "We can even specialize concept_interface for it." tripped me up. My thought was "but do I have to?
No. It is only needed if you want to add extra functionality in the composite concept.
and how do composed concepts interact with manually composed any's?" so I gave it a try:
<snip>
great everything works as expected, and no, I did not have to define a concept_interface for the composite interface. Now the first question is why would I want to?
Take a look at the iterator concepts. forward_iterator is a composite of several operators. The specialization of concept_interface adds typedef std::forward_iterator_tag iterator_category;
now the main reason for the exercise was how do these interact with each other and while I am at it how do they interact with the concepts they are composed of? Well I can freely interact as I hoped:
any_vecconcept acvec2(alvec); any_manual_vecconcept alvec2(acvec);
any_push_back pb3(alvec); any_push_back pb4(acvec);
any_size s2(alvec); any_size s3(acvec);
This is great! I might have missed it in the documentation, but I think this is really an important feature that deserves special mention.
It is documented in the reference. I agree that conversions deserve a separate section. (There is a subsection of Design Notes detailing the different constructors)
Now I gather that there is no way to do the opposite, something along the lines of any_vecconcept acvec3 = dynamic_any_cast<any_vecconcept>(s3); Well over the next days I will dive a bit deeper into the internals to see if implementing such a feature would be feasible. (because I need it before I could replace my current solution with type erasure)
It's possible in principle, but it would require extra global tables, some extensions to the binding interface, and some kind of registration mechanism. In Christ, Steven Watanabe