Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
Are you suggesting that Spirit be renamed to Boost Parsing Library? Sorry, but no thanks. I understand that it's too late to rename the library now. However, I'd like to ask to reconsider naming of yet to be released libraries, like Karma or Qi (or what was it?).
Just read the first paragraphs of the 'Introduction' in the docs and you'll know. That's something you'll have to do anyways, even if the library has a 'functional' name.
No, I wouldn't have to read the docs, if the library had a more descriptive name and I was looking for something else. If I'm looking for smart pointers and see a Boost.Format library, I immediately know that it's not what I'm looking for.
I disagree. Karma was never advertized as a top-level Boost Library. It should, IMO.
Think about this again and you'll see Joel's point.
Karma is based on the idea, that a grammar usable to parse an input sequence may as well be used to generate the very same sequence in the output. Qi and Karma use exactly the same description of the (expected/generated) format - a grammar.
I've already admitted that this thought has its merit. However, this major submission still has to pass the review, IMHO.
How long did they exist as parts of Spirit? Were they approved to be included as parts of Spirit and/or recommended/allowed to be used independently? Why would Spirit contain a duplicate for Lambda and how they can (or should they?) coexist gracefully in the user's code? Which one should be used by default? These questions may sound silly to you, but I recently happened to write an article about Boost libraries, and such questions took a lot of time to answer. I believe, every developer exploring Boost will stumble on such questions sooner or later.
All these question do not have any connection to the naming issue related to which you're trying to make a point.
These questions have connection to my second point about treating sub-libraries. This topic that was highlighted during the original discussion.