On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:16:48 +0000 Alexander Lamaison <awl03@doc.ic.ac.uk> wrote:
I meant to mention this: please, no ;) Can we make it .raw() or .str() or something, anything but an operator overload?
operator* has a long history of providing the contents of a variable, even in C, and is a lot less typing to boot. But if you have any technical arguments against it, I'm listening.
operator* in not about providing the contents of a variable, it is about dereferencing something that points to an address, be that a real pointer, a C++ iterator, etc.
In C, that's the case. In C++, it isn't; very few iterators are implemented as raw pointers. Boost.Optional isn't either, and I believe I've seen other types that have adopted the same idea.
utf8_t is just a class holding it's internal data as a std::string. In a similar way to std::stringstream which gives access to its internal string via .str() or std::string which serves up a raw char* string via .c_str().
There's certainly room for something like .raw() or .str(), but I'm partial to keeping operator* too.
While we're questioning cosmetic details, I'm wondering about the choice of utf8_t vs utf8 or utf8_string. What does the _t signify? I was under the impression that _t meant typedef; for example wchar_t started life as a typedef rather than a primitive data type.
That may have been the original intended meaning, but wchar_t is a true type of its own nowadays, at least on the compilers I use. I read it as a shortened form of "_type" now. -- Chad Nelson Oak Circle Software, Inc. * * *