Yuval Ronen wrote:
OK. If only boost::lexical_cast was doing it, we could actually use it...
And maybe not even then. Providing a uniform interface for conversion from any type to any type using an intermediate string sounds good at first, but when you think of it, it's quite useless. I've *never* had any need to convert between two types via a string. All I needed was to serialize to string, and de-serialize from string. These two usages are inherently different because de-serialization can fail, while serialization always succeeds. This means different interface by two separate functions - the de-serialization interface (and only it) should account for error handling. Insisting on the current cast-like interface is no good, since it prevents much needed interface improvements such the one I mentioned, and others Stefan Slapeta mentioned in his post. I hope the interface accepted to the standard will take this into account... Yuval