RE: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Brian S. <bs...@mi...>]

Additionally, I think it's funny how most people who dislike STL say =
that it's "too hard to debug". =20

I've often thought that you could take Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five =
stages of dying (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) =
and map it pretty well to process of learning the STL.  The earliest is =
denial - the idea that the problem lies within STL rather than your own =
code. =20

In the early stages, everyone gets bit by some aspect of STL.  Example: =
erasing items from containers can invalidate iterators.  Let's say you =
make that mistake.  So you spend time trolling through obfuscated =
template code trying to figure out what stupid mistake was made in the =
STL, because God knows there's no bugs in your code.  After you figure =
out the problem, you might read the documentation and find that the =
container is behaving exactly as advertised. =20

Or you might decide that you've had it at that point.  I suspect that's =
where a lot of people bail out.

But the notion that the STL needs much debugging, or any really, is a =
fallacy in my opinion.  It can be hard to look at the code and figure =
out what you're doing wrong, but I've never seen anyone in the denial =
stage actually find a bug in it.

--brian
(not on the VC++ team, have never met Plauger, and am in no way =
defending his coding style)

-----Original Message-----
From:	Kent Quirk [mailto:ken...@co...]
Sent:	Mon 12/24/2001 8:15 AM
To:	Brian Hook
Cc:	gam...@li...
Subject:	Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

I *really* have to disagree here.=20

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.=20

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:
>=20
> At 10:08 AM 12/21/2001 -0500, Thatcher Ulrich wrote:
> >but IMHO the STL stinks as far as usability goes.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> Someone should sift through the STL source code some time then come =
back
> and tell me it's GOOD.
>=20
> 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.

--=20
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Kent Quirk                   | MindRover: "Astonishingly creative."
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