klarer@ca.ibm.com wrote:
1. is it implementable? 2. has it been implemented? 3. has the implementation been tested? 4. has it been used? how widely? 5. is it sufficiently useful? 6. can it be specified rigorously for a standard? 7. does it integrate well with the rest of standard C++?
How many of these criteria were applied to export? :o) And to illustrate bias again, why weren't: 8. can it be implemented efficiently? 9. could users pay for features they're not using? there? That's where policy_ptr might be in better shape than shared_ptr. If I were around, I would have made sure those criteria are included as well.
It's easy to petulantly assert that the people who expressed "no support .. at this time" are motivated by conflict of interest or evil spirits, but the simple fact is that a group of responsible and professional agents didn't find the proposal compelling enough. That's the thing about proposals; you need to sell them. There are lots of powerful ways to sell an idea, and attending a meeting to address concerns and reservations is only one of them (for example, Boost is a brilliant mechanism for proving the value of a proposal, and TR1 demonstrates that). Disparaging the folks to whom you want to sell an idea is not an effective sales technique and, obviously, it's counter-productive since it impairs your credibility.
Hey, nobody disparaged anyone; I took time to explain how I myself am biased, and how others might be biased, and I also gave an example of a potential bias. From there to "evil spirits" it's a long way. Maybe "conflict of interest" ain't the proper syntagm, and "unintentional bias" would be. Library design and appreciation is subjective; that makes it hard to stay unbiased towards a particular design. I know I am biased myself, albeit not to the point of being unreasonable. Naturally I'd believe others might be as well, and I don't think I dispense offense in saying that. At the end of the day, it's very true: one has to sell one's design, and that happens exactly because appreciating ("buying" :o)) a design is an experience that has a strong subjective aspect to it. Andrei