Re: containers tentative design summary

[Tuomo Keskitalo <Tuomo dot Keskitalo at iki dot fi>]

Hello,

On 11/14/2009 04:42 PM, Brian Gough wrote:

> At Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:07:43 -0700,
> Gerard Jungman wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 14:42 +0000, Brian Gough wrote:
> > > Ok, I have read the paper now.  I do think the practice of casting
> > > described there is rather dated.  When people had no viable
> > > alternative to C, they had to resort to such tricks.  It is not
> > > something that should be encouraged today -- programs should either be
> > > written safely, following the rules of type-checking in C, or be
> > > written in another language.
>
> From 1.3 million lines of code they describe only one method which
> does not use casts, which is the one we use.  I don't think we are
> going to find anything that is better than the current method for
> views.

Apparently this is a fundamental question.

Currently GSL uses C in a type-safe manner which forces somewhat 
complicated APIs for everyone but enables users to find some lethal 
bugs. More user-friendly APIs would allow people to silently break their 
programs if they are not careful. And there is no compromise. Does this 
summarize the situation?

I am sure there are users for both approaches. I don't know.. Maybe GSL 
should be the safe, strict library, and there should be another 
scientific library in C which aims towards interoperability between 
data, libraries and languages? This would split forces, but both 
projects would also benefit from each other.

Anyway, I am interested to see what Gerard comes up with.

--
Tuomo.Keskitalo@iki.fi
http://iki.fi/tuomo.keskitalo