I would prefer it's named boost::classic::lexical_cast but I'm not sure what is the policy in other boost libraries (Spirit classic comes to mind but it's classic in a some other way :)
I don't know it either and I have no strong feelings to this name so I can be changed if desired.
Also, it would be more efficient to use NULL p_loc for classic rather than &std::locale::classic() because you could turn
#ifndef BOOST_LEXICAL_CAST_ASSUME_C_LOCALE ... #endif
into
if(p_loc) { ... }
Yes. But first of all it would require to use &std::locale() as global locale in place of current NULL. This would mean that a copy of the locale has to be done each time lexical_cast is called. And although copying std::locale objects should be simple it still is some overhead compared to original version which did not do this. Also time of acquisition of the global locale object would be different the in the original version of lexical_cast. I think that in good written code it should not matter. However I preferred to introduce as few changes to the original lexical_cast as possible so I chose NULL to mean global locale instead of classic one. Adam Badura