also sprach Doug Gregor
The quick tour describes the descriptors:
Their concept, yeah. Not necessarily how to extend them or use them in advanced cases.
or the get_property method...
The use of property maps is described here:
http://www.boost.org/libs/graph/doc/using_property_maps.html
It does not explain to me what get_property does when called on an edge descriptor. If get_property is not to be used by me, then I wonder why it's not protected.
The BGL isn't (and isn't intended to be) an object-oriented library. It's a generic library, and while OOP and generic programming share some common notions of abstract data types and polymorphism, they are different programming paradigms with different design strategies.
Yes, they are. And I am only starting to learn to separate them, so thanks for your patience.
Your post on c.l.c++.m actually reminded me of the other reason that properties can't be embedded into the vertex and edge descriptors: circular references. In the BGL adjacency_list, vertex descriptors can't have property type information in them, because the property type might rely on the type of the vertex descriptor.
Yes, this is essentially my problem.
So, here's how I see it. You can definitely write your own (non-generic) graph type however it makes the most sense for your application. Then if you want to use BGL algorithms, you can write the interface code a la the LEDA adaptors. If you try to make that graph type too generic, you're going to run into the circular reference problem again. Or, you could use the BGL's graph types, which may not fit as cleanly in your application but are already implemented and play nicely with the rest of the BGL.
I truly appreciate your feedback and will let it settle for a while. I'll (probably) be back. -- martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.) \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck invalid/expired pgp subkeys? use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver! spamtraps: madduck.bogus@madduck.net do micro$oft's total cost of operation calculations include total cost of downtime?