Re: Is STL of bad quality?

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:38:29 CST
Message-ID:
<dec12df8-cccd-4ca3-9b7e-d31ceead43b8@k18g2000vbq.googlegroups.com>
On Feb 23, 3:44 pm, DeMarcus <use_my_alias_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:

On 02/22/2011 11:16 PM, Mike Gibson wrote:

On Feb 22, 12:13 pm, DeMarcus<use_my_alias_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I try to find ways to understand whether my code is of good quality. I
just read the article by Robert C. Martin - OO Design Quality Metrics.

http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/oodmetrc.pdf

In the article, a highly stable package should have a high abstraction.
I.e. a package that many are dependent upon should present a big number
of abstract interfaces.

Everything in the article seemed reasonable until I started to look at
real life cases. If we look at STL, the whole community is dependent on
it, so it's very stable, but it doesn't present any abstract interfaces.
Is the STL of bad quality?

I don't think so. The STL is very good. So my question is; Where do I
make the misconception? What have I missed?


That the STL uses template to achieve abstraction, not inheritance and
abstract classes.


That's true. Thanks!

Still, at page 6, he is not very clear about what he means with "Number
of abstract classes in category".


The article you cite is from 1994. Most C++ compilers still
didn't support templates. It's somewhat normal that someone,
writing then, thinks of abstraction only in terms of
inheritance.

I found another good article with R. Martin - Design Principles and
Design Patterns.

www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Principles_and_Patterns.pdf

At page 22 he says "Interfaces are very often included in the package
that uses them, rather in the package that implements them".


Applied to the STL (which calls them concepts in this context):
things like CopyConstructable and Assignable are defined in the
STL, and not by the packages that use them.

--
James Kanze

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