On 20/03/2008, Tom Brinkman <reportbase@gmail.com> wrote:
Why would one bother to do this.
Good question. Maybe just because they say that you cant. That's almost a good enough reason for me:-)
It was raised with a mpl vector snippet in April 2005: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/121612 I think it is useful as then you can do all sorts of compile time string / packet manipulation for parsing, offset calculations and take a whole bunch of run time calcs out of the equation with some elegance and ease the maintenance burden. Plenty of first, follows compile time parsing you can do from a grammar POV. Interesting foo you could do for a lexical parser, regex or other kinds of state machine optimisation. Perfect hashing for strings at compile time... The main problem is you can't do this without a pre-processing stage elegantly. There is just no way to support a macro or any other succinct form of compile time string without a pre-processing stage. It is just clumsy. $AUD 0.02, --Matt. __cts"matthurd@acm.org"