Gennadiy Rozental <gennadiy.rozental <at> thomson.com> writes:

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String-algo : Interested, but concern over interface and choice of functions, generic vs basic_string.5.3 separate proposal

Any details on this? I love this library, and I would love to see it standardized in some form. Overall I've found the interface and function choices to be excellent (and I'd love to see even more), and I love that it's generic and not limited to basic_string. I use it on vectors and other containers for different kinds of network protocol parsing.

Thorsten Ottosen acted as champion for the paper, but I'll try to recall the discussion.

There concern was that at least some of the algorithms were only useful in the context of strings, and so it would be an over-generalization to supply them as free algorithms.

My notes say that the solution that got most support was free-standing functions for "arbitrary strings". So support for stuff like rope was considered important. Let me also recap some other feedback: (a) the algorithms should work directly with string literals as they do today in boost. (b) many requested additional motivation for choosing this particular set of functions.

My point exactly. I believe string_algo library went (completely?) wrong way. It should never use iterator parameterization, but char type only. If there exist any algorithm that is useful beyond strings - it doesn't belong to this library.

Well, there are just too many string types out there to base the interface on basic_string<CharT>. Besides, it would not be very c++-ish to preach generic programming yet avoid using it in obvious places in the standard library. -Thorsten