
Dear Vicente & others, Would anyone like to share any practical or motivating applications for the proposed Boost.Conversion library? It seems to me that there are practical applications for particular types of conversion, e.g. T-to-string and string-to-T, and numeric casts, and serialisation. Apart from that, I am having trouble seeing practical reasons for generic conversion. A motivating case would be if a generic algorithm required conversion, but in the cases that I can think of either (a) the generic algorithm takes a functor, so the caller can pass the currently-required conversion as part of a lambda expression, or (b) you might need to select one of several possible conversions between a pair of types, which this library can't do, or (c) the algorithms are std:: ones which won't work with this library anyway. Example: struct person { string firstname; string surname; }; vector<person> people; // sorted by firstname // Try to find everyone with firstname "John": std::equal_range(people.begin(),people.end(),"John"); That doesn't work. Making it work has always struck me as more difficult than it should be. Can this library make it easier? If not, what similar problems can it help with? Regards, Phil.