Brian Allison <brian@dtmr.com> writes:
But how would it change anything? We don't "guarantee" anything today, and I'm pretty sure we won't guarantee anything a year from now either.
I wasn't suggesting any guarantees be put forth; that's why I used quotes around 'guaranteed'. Perhaps it would have been less imprecise if I had said: If only highly conformant compilers were in the 1st category - presuming such a category had sufficient usefulness to the developers to warrant the concept of categorization - then the users of Boost could be less likely to miss the fact that the only obligation the developers assigned to themselves was attempting to write compliant code which a conforming compiler would therefore accept. Then the developers could concentrate on the expressing the thoughts into code instead of concerning themselves to any great degree with non-conformant platforms. Which would then make it more obvious to the non-developers that the burden of non-conformant compilers is intrinsically on the shoulders of those who choose the non-conformant compilers. Sorry if that's too verbose, I'm under significant workload and didn't take much time on the explanation. Also, I didn't think that the most concise message was the empty set - aplogies if I was mistaken.
The problem is that as you make it more precise, you also make it clear that it's not very meaningful. Even most compilers we'd consider to be "quite conformant" are not without their issues. So, I'd like to see some way of formulating this so that we can all understand what it really means for: users library developers testers (anyone I left out?) -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com