On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:52 PM, Raindog <raindog@macrohmasheen.com> wrote:
Joseph Gauterin wrote:
That's a pity - a lot of libraries could have greatly benefitted from concepts. On the plus side, we really don't want to end up with a repeat of the export debacle or similar. _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
I think it is a tragedy. While reading about why not to use C++, or STL, or Boost, the biggest issue I've seen recently is "template error messages are too large and meaningless". Bjarne has said that one C++0x's was to make it more user friendly, but it appears we will lose the biggest feature towards that goal.
Disappointing, but hardly tragic. It would have been tragic if the standard adopted a definition of concepts that failed to improve support for generic programming or made it worse worse. I think Doug Gregor - somewhere in the comments here: http://cpp-next.com/archive/2009/08/what-happened-in-frankfurt/ - summarizes the problem nicely. "What was missing from these discussions was the input of everyday
programmers: we lacked enough usage experience with concepts to determine whether potential problems would affect real-world code, or how often these problems would occur".
Andrew Sutton andrew.n.sutton@gmail.com