on Sun Mar 31 2013, Stefan Strasser
I can understand your viewpoint, but even if I wasn't involved in IT at the time, and certainly not at that level, I can still say that it always seemed rather obvious to me that the "metafunction concept" of Boost.MPL is a workaround because of missing native language features (using template, class, typedef). so I was surprised that it was introduced into the standard when there was a chance to natively support metafunctions.
There's a chance to support lots of things natively that nobody has yet implemented, used, formalized, or proposed. Invent the mechanism and put it in a real compiler, and *then* maybe, if it gets used, it will be time to propose it for standardization.
that isn't saying that anyone did a bad job when introducing type traits, and I'm sorry if it was perceived that way.
I think you're missing the point. The committee tries hard not to engage in feature invention, and in the rare cases when it does, somebody creates an actual implementation of the feature. -- Dave Abrahams