Pavel Vozenilek wrote:

"John Torjo" wrote:

...

The FORMAL Review of "Output Formatter" library begins today,

I briefly looked on the library and wrote down few notes. I am especially interested in point [4].

1. Name of the library would be better changed. Hearing it for the first time I suspected something like variant on std::endl.

I agree, especially as it also works for input as well.

2. The first part of documentation should be what is purpose of the library.

okay.

I guess in this case it is debugging and testing support, 100% cases.

It can also be used for additional stuff (see Techniques section for examples). As a demonstration, if you implement localization within your program by providing a std::map< std::string, std::string > locale; where you do something like: std::cout << locale[ "usage" ]; you can use my library to read it in. I understand you can use the serialization library to do this, but you can control the formatting in my library, allowing: english.loc "welcome" = "My World" "" spanish.loc "wecome" = "Mi Tierra" "" german.loc "wecome" = "Meine Welt" "" I am not sure how feasible it is to do something like this in the serialization library.

4. There seems to be significant overlap with Boost.Serialization (I suspect outfm doesn't handle cyclic structures).

outfmt does not support cyclic structures.

It may or may not be possible to implement outfm functionality with special archive.

Was this considered?

Is it possible to control the formatting for the same type to produce different results? For example: std::pair< std::pair< int, char >, std::pair< int, char > > p; std::cout << io::formatob( p, io::pairfmt ( io::pairfmt().format( " | " ), io::pairfmt().format( "{ ", " }", " : " ) ) ).format( "<: ", " :>" ); // output: <: ( 5 | a ), { 5 : a } :>

5. To support debugging I would like to see many more features:

It is possible to create your own format object and delimeter formatter classes to extend the libraries functionality, so some of what you suggest can be done that way. I am thinking of extending the library to support function objects as delimeter types, thus expanding the possible uses of the library. I am also planning on supporting character escaping to better support string in/output as well as allowing HTML/XML character escapers. You can produce simple HTML/XML output using format(), for example: std::cout << io::formatob( vec, io::containerfmt ( io::wrappedfmt().format( "<li>", "</li>" ) ).format( "<ol>", "</ol>" ) ); // output: <ol><li>a</li><li>b</li><li>c</li></ol> Regards, Reece _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself with cool new emoticons http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/myemo