----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Turkanis" <technews@kangaroologic.com> To: <boost@lists.boost.org> Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 1:40 AM Subject: [boost] Re: Functions as Filters (was Program Reuse...)
Bob Bell wrote:
quoted here is really quite minor. The second thing that's apparent is that your ToUpper relies on global variables, whereas toupper_filter relies on function arguments, which in my mind is a more heavily-weighted concern than the complexity difference. My question is why you do you think relying on globals is a better approach? Some of your points have been motivated by the needs of novice C++ programmers; do you really think it is better to advocate a programming style that relies on global variables?
Reading and writing to cin and cout, is a long established effective practice which results in generic and easily reused code. I am not simply advocating for needs of novice programmers. I am not a novice, but I always want my code to be written as if for novices whereever possible. It is my experience that when writing as if for novices usually results in code which is more easy to maintain, reuse and document.
I was going to mention the global variables, but in fairness I think the four global streams have special status. If I could redesign the standard iostreams library without concern for backward compatibility, I'd change a number of things but I'm not sure I'd require users to write
std::cout::instance() << "Hello World!\n";
I'm interested to know exactly what Christopher thinks is too complex about the filter concepts, since I'm sure others will share his view.
I don't think they are too complicated! They do precisely what they should do, the way they should do it. I don't think that the filter concepts can and should be simplified any further. I however want the alternative option to use a void function which operate on cin and cout, as a filter when it is appropriate. CD