-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday 16 March 2007 03:23 am, Oliver.Kowalke@qimonda.com wrote:
I still believe that futures should be combinable via operator&& and operator|| - for users of the boost::future library is it more intuitive that the resulting future of an future comination contains the result instead of future<bool> and be force to check all related futures for their return status and return value.
I've clearly failed to communicate my criticisms clearly. I was not presenting an alternate syntax for the future combination functions. I was presenting another function with semantics that bear no direct relation to the combination functions, but whose prototype would conflict with the proposed use of operator|| and && for the combination functions. Maybe it would have been clearer if I had said future<bool> operator||(const future<bool> &, const future<bool>&); I was not objecting to the functionality of combining futures (I don't really have an opinion on that) I was objecting to the choice of overloading operators instead of using normal function names. To a user of libpoet, where the correspondence between futures and their values is emphasized, seeing something like future_a || future_b in code, the principle of least surprise would lead them to guess that the meaning of the overloaded operation would be to return a future whose value corresponded to applying logical or to the values of future_a and future_b. This behaviour would correspond to an active_function created from the ordinary operator|| acting on values. The confusion only underscores my point. Overloading a function name (or operator) with multiple functions that bear no direct semantic relationship to each other is merely confusing. The namespace for possible operators is extremely limited. Unfortunately, this seems to make everyone with a neat idea want to overload an operator with it, so that everyone notices their function and is more likely to use it. - -- Frank -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFF+pLk5vihyNWuA4URAsFfAKC40HgefbbOcYUvuPItqIxO4+6jEgCg4uMW dwoS6I+e1t3oWN8gbnCmDCk= =9llc -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----