Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Kent Q. <ken...@co...>]

I *really* have to disagree here. 

The DESIGN of the STL is absolutely gorgeous. I have never seen another
container library that has such a neat separation of containers,
iterators, algorithms, and data. The more I use the STL the more I love
its design. 

Yes, there are warts on the usage of the STL that mostly come from
limitations in C++. Plauger's implementation (for Microsoft) is
appalling in its use of (nearly) obfuscated variable names, etc. But I
have found that idiomatic use of the STL drastically reduces both the
amount of code I have to write and the number of errors I make in that
code.

One of my frustrations with Java is the lack of ability to write
anything like the STL in it. It's a frustration because I otherwise like
it a great deal.

STLPort fixes a lot of the problems with MS's version, btw, though it's
still not perfect.

	Kent


Brian Hook wrote:
> 
> At 10:08 AM 12/21/2001 -0500, Thatcher Ulrich wrote:
> >but IMHO the STL stinks as far as usability goes.
> 
> THANK you for saying that.  I'm so tired of people going on and on about
> how great STL is (it's probably the #1 validation of C++ and templates I've
> seen), when in fact IT'S NOT THAT GOOD.  It's convoluted, difficult to
> debug, has bizarre syntax, takes forever to compile, generates tons of
> warnings, requires third party implementations for stability.  The only
> reason people dig on it is that they didn't have to write it.
> 
> Someone should sift through the STL source code some time then come back
> and tell me it's GOOD.
> 
> The primary advantage is that if you need a List or a Map you can just use
> STL without having to reroll it, but since I have that stuff lying around
> anyway, it doesn't bother me.

-- 
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Kent Quirk                   | MindRover: "Astonishingly creative."
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