John Maddock wrote:
You mean rely on the usual streaming << >> operators?
For sure I could do that, but full string conversion is crazy expensive compared to the byte-by-byte scheme I have now.
Hmm - I presume you've already had to implement these operators. So you'd be done for text based archives like text_archve and xml_archive. For these cases, I wouldn't worry about the expense as these archives are already slow enough due to all the streaming conversions they do already, I doubt anyone would notice - oh and don't forget about xml parsing. So for these archive classes: a) performance isn't really an issue. b) it's helpful to be able to read floats/double, etc as human readable strings. c) it consumes no extra development time. - it's free! I'm thinking the only place where making special overload would make sense would be for portable binary archive - which as far as I know doesn't currently support floating point types in any case. Hmmm - maybe you want to generalize your method to any size float/double and include it as part of portable binary archive? That would be great! Robert Ramey