Deane Yang wrote:
Paul,
Paul A Bristow wrote:
1 There is VIOLENT opposition to requiring pi(). You may not like it, but there IS! I am sympathetic to this view - many equations are complex enough with yet more bracket clutter.
Where is this "VIOLENT opposition" being expressed? I have never seen anything of the sort on this list; I have only seen your assertions that it exists. Could you elaborate?
Deane
I unfortunately have seen this opposition too, although not on the boost list. I've mostly encountered it from my colleagues who are physicists first, and use code as a tool, but couldn't care less about actually learning current idioms. For instance, there was a recent discussion on mailing list for the ROOT software package, which is a high energy physics analysis framework written in C++ (based on the CINT C++ interpreter). The discussion was about the introduction of more "modern" idioms into the visible programmer interface, and there was vociferous opposition (mostly from those who have been around for a while) to the use of such "exotic" C++ features as templates because "most compilers don't support them yet", and new style casts, "because the C way is less verbose". There was also concern expressed about using boost components because some people thought that most of boost relied on "non-standard" C++ that "wasn't portable except to a few platforms". Mention of smart pointers among my memory leaking colleagues is met with blank stares ... memory leaks are, after all, just a part of writing code in C and C++, right? The complaints I've heard about namespaces alone would be enough to bring you to tears... Make no mistake ... these are very, very smart people saying these things. But like most of us, they just can't or won't be bothered to invest energy in keeping up with current trends in areas outside their fields of expertise. That all said, I don't put much weight on the opinions of practitioners who fail to keep current or to understand why things are the way they are. Boost should "do the right thing". The users who complain will follow along after a time, because they'll have no choice ... their tools will change out from under them, and their graduate students will roll their eyes and force them to adapt to the modern idioms. We shouldn't be held back by the whiners ... if we did, the projects I work on would still be writing all our data acquisition and analysis code in Fortran IV :-)
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