Neil Mayhew wrote:
On 5/23/08 7:11 AM, Beman Dawes wrote:
In working on endian, I became convince that the C++ standard's POD specification was a serious impediment and needed major revision. The standards committee agreed, and so C++0x will include a major relaxation on the requirements for POD's... So the next step is to revisit the current endian design, and apply C++0x features where useful.
Thanks for this clarification. The standard changes sound great, and it makes sense to take advantage of these in endian, where possible.
Some of these features are starting to become available in compilers, so they can be tested.
However, I think it will be a while before I myself am able to use a compiler with these features, whereas I'd like to use endian asap. How about we get the current implementation into boost more or less as-is, and then work on improving it with new compiler features as these become available?
I'm buried with other commitments, so if someone else wants to help with endian it might speed things up quite a bit.
What kind of help did you have in mind?
I just took a look at the current state of the library, and it seems to be in pretty good shape. So the main help would be careful review and commenting on a revised version. I'll try to get that out in a week or so.
Is there anything that needs to be done that doesn't involve using new compiler features?
Yes. The two enums need to be moved into subnamespaces to simulate C++0x scoped enums. Questions: * For efficiency, should an operator= taking a value_type argument be added? (I can't remember why there isn't one.) * Should there be a conversion to bool? * Should there be a way (#ifdef? separate class?) to provide an interoperable version that meets C++03 POD requirements, so endian objects can be put in unions? Is that what you mean by (1) below?
The areas that I am interested in seeing more work done on are (1) making constructors "conditional" and (2) adding a bit-range access method.
Do you have a proposed design for bit-range access? What is the use case or motivation for bit-range access? Thanks, --Beman