Re: [boost] [review][JSON] Review of JSON starts today: Sept 14 - Sept 23

Vinnie Falco wrote:

That is easy to say but what do you do about this function which returns a reference:

inline value& array::operator[]( std::size_t pos ) noexcept;

What do you do if you have an array of int (scalar) and someone accesses an element in the middle and assigns a string to it?

The only possible answer is "copy the entire thing into value[]". This may or may not be acceptable. I would think that if you have an array of 8044 ints, assigning a string somewhere in the middle would be a rare occurrence, but who knows. The upside is that an array of ints would consume significantly less memory than today; this is often important and we've already seen that for a subset of users, memory consumption is _the_ important metric. (It would also make value_to infinitely faster.) The downside of course is that when someone assigns a single non-int somewhere, or even just invokes the non-const op[] without assigning a non-int, or the non-const begin(), the whole thing reallocates. This would kill the noexcept, at the very minimum. There's a thing to be said here about returning references to internal state, but consistency has its benefits. For CBOR 1.0, I'd just reject binary values on parsing. That's still much more useful than not having it.