Sohail Somani:
If the boost::placeholders namespace was to exist, I was suggesting that boost standardize on the placeholders in that namespace.
OK, but what does this mean in the short term? What shoud we do with the immediate problem of bind's global placeholders?
This way, one can add "using namespace boost::placeholders" where there is a lot of binding going on and not worry about whether they should be using lambda's _1 or bind's _1 or phoenix arg1 or whatever else there is now.
This is unlikely. First, Lambda will probably not be converted to use placeholders other than its own. Second, once you have several competing libraries, you have to decide on the type of _1 + 1; it can't return both a Phoenix expression and a Lambda expression unless Phoenix expressions and Lambda expressions are interchangeable, in which case you basically have one library.