William E. Kempf wrote:
Markus Werle said:
[...] A hard burden You lay on developers.
It's not a burden.
Well, it depends: once You _have_ a library written in the other style and once You have tested it (maybe certified it) and started to let other programs depend on it, a style change might be at least very annoying, because names from the lib appear in the user's code. If the dependency tree is large, that _is_ a burden.
So maybe the code has to be piped through a code de-beautifier when it comes to a boostification.
That's a bit harsh.
It was not meant to be harsh. Maybe throwing in my opinion about what is beauty was a bad idea, so if You have a shell prompt at hand: # cat mypost | sed -e s/de-beautifier/converter/g
If *you* don't care for the style,
I care. That's the reason for the OP.
you're welcome to that opinion, but voicing it in this manner isn't going to help anyone to agree with you.
I am not on a jihad for some code style, but rather on an investigation tour how much it takes to boostify existing code. I just sometimes cannot hold back my comments on things I dislike to be as they are. Please assume from now on that I do not want to try to change the boost rules (I give up before trying) but rather find a convenient way to obey them without sacrificing too much.
IMHO (UsingThisConventionHere == CommonPracticeElsewhere)
It's not common practice everywhere
No contradiction here. Unfortunately it is common pratice for some very famous C++ books like Herb's, Nicolai's, Andrei's and David V.'s books. That is why I talked about a heavy burden. At least David V.'s book will be without concurrence for a long time, so expect some programmers to GetUsedToThatStyleBeforeTheyCommitCodeToBoost.
But the important thing is that the whole point of Boost is to be a test bed and development area for libraries that *might* be considered for inclusion in the standard. As such, we have to follow the standard naming conventions.
Or change _them_? <- yes, it's a joke!!! Seriously: This argument is strong enough to stop the discussion about styles immediately, therefore let us find satisfying solutions for the follwing case: If some guy has written code that he thinks is good enough to expose it to a boost review and the only problem he sees with his lib is the completely different naming convention. What do You propose him to do? I see several possibilities: 1. The standard rules, AFAICS, are meant for the _user_ interface (I guess this from the bogus names some vendors use to make their internal code completly unreadable) So would it be acceptable if some boost::lib is rule-compliant in the interface and for the "public" namespaces, while retaining the other style in the brain-damaging internals, where some programmers might need them to understand their own code? Minimalist's approach: only _add_ aliases for the user interface that follow the convention: namespace conformant_garbage_c = GarbageC; ... template typedefs at hand, soon ... 2. Another possibility - which is cleaner and maybe to prefer - would be the automatic code conversion. If You have a convenient tool for that, I would like to test it on some code (e.g. Loki, Daixtrose) to see the effects. The sed approach from above may help, but I could not yet extract from the docs how to apply regexes such that MyOldStyle becomes my_old_style. I think this could be a 5-liner with boost::regex. I haven't used that lib until today, so I say ThankYou (thank_you) for any code snippet which may serve as a starting point. best regards, Markus