Somewhere in the E.U., le 28/10/2004 Bonjour In article <cllsnh$eb3$1@sea.gmane.org>, "Robert Ramey" <ramey@rrsd.com> wrote: [SNIP problems between serialize and my current toolsets, which in the short term prevent me from adding serialization to quaternions and octonions]
With the serialization library is intended to be used to save and restore the state of an arbitrary set of C++ data structures. The particular format used to store the data is implemented as and "archive class". The archive class can be selected independently of the data to be serialized. Some archives have readable or semi-readable formats. E.g XML or plain text, while others or opaque to human perception - binary. The data stored in an archive is designed to capture all the information required to restore it to its original state and is driven by the structure of the data saved. Serialization is not intended for and generally not suitable for reading and parsing some other input format.
OK. So while this is indeed important, it does not solve my problem (simplification of input operators, due to the complexity of legal input syntax).
Here is where I believe the confusion lies.
a) If one wan't to display something for human consumption such as a report, debug log or what ever, An output format library might be useful. b) If one wants to save and restore something to its original state, the serialization libary will be useful. c) If one wants to read some input text in some specified format, parse it and generate some data instances - spirit may be helpful.
[SNIP]
Generally, I would think that concentrating on using the above tools for the above purposes rather than trying to extend them too far beyound thier original motivation and design goals will lead to more complexity and overlapp than necessary or desirable.
Robert Ramey
Precisely. But the scope of sprit is very wide, so a dedicated library (solving efficiently a class of problems) would be welcome. Nothing prevents that dedicated library being based on a more general framework (such as spirit, in the case of "out"put iterators), of course. Cordialement Hubert Holin