On Jul 9, 2007, at 11:12 PM, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
Finally, it is important to keep a balance between encapsulation and transparency. While it is true that, semantically at least, one could map some of the helpers by STL (or boost, for that matter) types, I deliberately refrained from such an approach, to allow existing implementations to be bound to the API. In particular, I'm using here libxml2 as backend, which has been fine-tuned for best performance over a couple of years. I'm not courageous / naive enough to attempt to match such an implementation with a new one. Instead, I want a seamless mapping that doesn't impose any unnecessary copying or other indirection to mitigate the 'impedance mismatch'.
This is a very, very, very, very, very good approach. - Doug