On Saturday 31 May 2008 21:19, Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
I'm perfectly aware of this. And actually I expressed exactly the same by pointing out the main difference between the two sets of operators: the logical operators I proposed are for the futures themselves while the others are related to the future results.
But you're diligently ignoring my point: overloading the operators for the future results is conceptually equivalent to having a default conversion operator to the result type for the future itself! And for that reason I would not like to see something like that in the future library.
Ah, I think I'm understanding you better now. You are appalled by the idea of treating a future<T> like it was a T, is that correct? You want a future<T> to only be treated like an abstract handle to a value, not the value itself? I wasn't ignoring your point, it's just that your view is extremely foreign to how I view futures, so your words were almost meaningless to me. I view being able to view a future<T> as a placeholder for a T object as a large part of what makes futures useful. I implemented the future class in libpoet to support that, with implicit conversions from future<T> to future<U>, from T to future<T>, etc. And being able to treat a future<T> as a placeholder for a T is essential to implementing things like poet::active_function. I don't particularly like the implicit conversion from T to future<T>, but that has absolutely nothing to do with not wanting to treat a future<T> as a placeholder. It's simply because the conversion can block, and thus produce unexpected behavior (an object appearing on the right hand side of an assignment stalling your program). The explicit future::get() at least gives a hint that something more than a quick conversion might be happening. I guess the features that allow a future to act as a placeholder could be split out into a separate higher level class, call it "future_value", which would internally contain a plain old future. The idea doesn't really do anything for me, but maybe you would find it preferable?
OTOH, IMHO, having the logical operators alone improves code readability, simplifies the implementation (by avoiding multiple overloads for different parameter counts), allows to build more complex logical execution restrictions as (f1 || f2) && f3 (which is not possible using the proposed wait_for_all and wait_for_any), and all that without having to sacrifice any of the existing functionality.
The poet::future_barrier/future_composing_barrier/future_select/future_selector stuff I'm currently working on allows for composition. Did you see the earlier discussion on this a couple weeks ago? For example this thread: http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2008/05/137417.php
Personally, I don't particularly want to see a future library overload any logical operators at all, or at least have the overloads sequestered in separate headers that aren't included by any of the other future library headers.
That's a matter of taste, for sure. But would you mind telling us why you don't want to have these? Your opinion sounds to be quite strong, so you must have good reasons!
It's the obvious reason. I don't think taking a function with a 2 letter name, which is already overloaded, and adding a new set of overloads to it which have semantics completely unrelated to the existing overloads is a desirable or aesthetically pleasing interface. No one would even consider doing such a thing if the function wasn't an operator. I guess I just don't find operator syntax as compelling a feature as others.