On 3/06/2004, at 6:48 PM, John Phillips wrote:
*Making generic algorithms generic. Templates and overloading, of course, are able to simplify the library interface substantially. No more separate names for the float, double and complex versions of what is really the same algorithm.
Some things that may be natural in C++ implementations and very difficult or impossible in other libraries (again, not a complete list, but the ones I am thinking of at the moment).
With careful planning, there could be a lot of advantages from writing an object-oriented math library using generic programming etc. When I first heard about templates I wrote a floating-point-type generic ODE integrator, which I thought was great. But it was just a transliteration into C++ of a bog standard algorithm. Perhaps in a carefully thought-out OO design, each ODE step would be an object, and so things like recording of results and interpolating at intermediate points would have trivial interfaces. There may be other ways of re-thinking numerical algorithms into object oriented or metaprogramming frameworks - and I think that the C++ expertise of boost would be a good forum to develop ideas like that. There's a risk, though, that C++ features intruding to a low level would slow things down a lot. Can we hope that's something the compiler writers will sort out? Cheers, Geoff