----Original Message---- From: Pavel Antokolsky aka Zigmar [mailto:zigmar@gmail.com] Sent: 15 November 2005 14:55 To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [boost] Boost.Logging hex dumps (Was: Boost.Logging: formalreview)
On 11/15/05, Caleb Epstein <caleb.epstein@gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/15/05, Darryl Green <darryl.green@unitab.com.au> wrote:
>> Ok, will do. > > But note that will can bloat the library. Showing hex data is a > much harder
Hex data formatting (or any data formatting) shouldn't be part of the library. Or if it should, it probably means the lib shouldn't be dragging in all that std streams stuff that is supposed to be responsible for formatting...
The proposed Boost.Log library already depends (rightly, IMHO) on iostreams for message formatting and buffering of partially-formatted messages. I can't see why or how this dependency could be reasonably eliminated without major sacrifices to the usefulness of the library.
The necessary code to do hex dumps on an iostream should hardly be considered bloat. I agree with Gennadiy's assesment that 50 lines of code should be more than adequate to do it. These can be in a separate header file that is included only by the user. What possible harm could this be?
It would not hard of course, but I think this code does not belong to the logging library. It's such a common requirement that I think it does.
For example, in some cases I do not want to print non-ascii characters in hex dump, in others I do. ? How does a hex dump contain anything other than hex digits and space (to separate bytes). You might want a way of controlling whether to use upper or lower case letters (but I wouldn't bother).
The grouping depends on length of the data worlds I'm working with, and also should be configured, and so on. My point is that the simple solution is not even worth implementing, and general solution is definitely out of scope of logging library.
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