Marc Mutz wrote:
Very good point. With a mutating trim(), people are tempted to write std::for_each( v.begin(), v.end(), mem_fn( &super_string::trim ) ); which, strictly speaking, is not explicitly allowed by the std, IIRC. With a const trimmed(), the user would be forced to use std:transform(v.begin(),v.end(),v.begin(),mem_fn(&super_string::trimmed)); which much better conveys what the code does.
There's no restriction on for_each. I think the value of transform versus for_each for this case is marginal at best. As for trim versus trimmed, I'm afraid I don't like trimmed much. It's 'past tense'. To my ear it strikes as odd -- like the operation is already done. I normally think of mutating functions a present tense verbs. Just looking around a bit, Boost.string_algo-trim, QTString-trimmed, Java.String-trim, RWCString-strip -- so it's not that consistent. As much as anything I'm leveraging Boost.string_algo here, so consistent naming is a virtue. Hopefully this won't make you mad, but your prior email made me realize that the mutating functions should return a self reference so now you can write: s.trim().to_upper().append(" more stuff "); The other thing it made me realize is that it would be handy to have additional overloads on the number of parameters in append/insert_at. So in the next version you'll be able to write: double dbl = 1.12345; int i = 100; s.append(dbl, " a string ", i); //"1.12345 a string 100" I'll probably do something like boost.tuple and support up to 10 arbitrary parameters. And at the suggestion of someone else, I'm also adding boost.format into the mix: s.append_formatted(dbl, "-some string-", i, "%-7.2f %s %=5d"); //"1.12 -some string- 100 " So I'm afraid I'm making it more mutable, not less ;-) Jeff