Re: What's about the future of C++?
Earl Purple wrote:
Victor Bazarov wrote:
I just wonder how long do you think it would take the Committee to
agree on a single specification, given that now there are so many
different ones on the market... And who's going to write it?
Volunteers, I would imagine. But the implementation would hopefully
only require adapters to the various libraries on the market.
And what is the purpose, again? If there _were_ a need to have common
GUI specification, it would have existed already. There is no sense
in trying to rush the evolution. The Standard is as much a set of rules
as it is a reflection of trends. If there were trends now towards some
kind of standard in C++ GUI, we would have seen them, no? I haven't,
have you?
And, what volunteers? Would *you* volunteer to write it up? If yes,
why haven't you yet? If no, why not? As soon as you can answer this
to yourself, maybe you can understand why this is not the time yet...
By the time the specification is agreed upon and written up, the GUI
development (with new bells and whistles like handwriting recognition
and other tricks introduced annually) will have left the spec so far
in the past that implementing the Standard set will be so not enough
to satisfy anybody, that nobody would care... Just the impression I
get, anyway.
The impression I get is that C++ is still back in the early 80s with
console applications and is scared to progress in case they do so in a
way that is not perfect. With that in mind they wouldn't have given us
STL because that is not perfect - there are many things not so great
about STL but it's still better than not having it.
Uh... Does that mean that your impression is unfounded? They *have*
given us STL *dispite* the fact that it's not perfect, haven't they?
IMNSHO C++ is not "scared to progress", but rather it has progressed
enough in the areas where it was necessary to have a Standard. And it
keeps progressing in the same fashion. GUI is simply so unstable at
this point that it is not necessary nor is it possible to devise any
common standard.
Platforms where GUI is not appropriate simply would not use the
library. In the same way that you could have platforms with no console
and thus not use console functions.
What console functions? It seems you have a wrong impression about what
the Standard Library contains at this point.
Those who have implemented GUI will not be out of work - as even
standard GUI will still need implementations (just like Roguewave were
not out of work when STL came along). And as I said earlier, the
current libraries could probably be used to implement the standard
interfaces anyway.
Roguewave? Who's that?
V
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