On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 13:51 -0300, Fernando Cacciola wrote:
Agreed. And a good way to do that is to produce an updated version of the proposal with several use cases showing actual code using both interfaces, and pointing out exactly how the pointer interface is superior. OK. I'll do that.
Don't forget to include this http://boost.org/libs/optional/doc/optional.html#bool as a counter example. Currently we are using a wrapper around boost::optional that hides the pointer interface and provides instead empty() and value() (though has_value() and value() may be better to avoid confusion for things like optional<Some_STD_Container>). We use optional<bool> all over the place in classes read/written from databases and xml. Refactoring a bool to an optional<bool> would be a nightmare with the pointer interface. It is made worse by the fact that we generate some C++ code from the DB schema so someone changing from a "bit not null" to a "bit null" (aka "boolean null") in a table definition would quietly break our code at runtime (instead of causing a compiler error in the appropriate place). Hamish