Maxim Yegorushkin wrote:
I'd like to be able to specialize lexical_cast for certain source->target conversions. With its current design I see no possibility to do that as function templates can not be partially specialized. Are the any plans to change that?
Did you mean partial, or simply explicit specialization? For what do you need specialization? If you need it for extensibility, current framework is already extensible through definition of << and >> operators. If you need it for performance, we had a discussion about lexical_cast performance issues some time ago in thread named "lexical_cast with default value", and I googled other discussions too by searching for "lexical_cast performance". We weren't able to provide enough arguments for such specialization, and ended with a need for fast numeric conversion library which won't be related to lexical_cast at all. For performance reasons I use the patch I described in http://lists.boost.org/boost/2005/05/26031.php to allow specialization. Andrey