Re: Please help with testing & improving a StringValue class

* Alf P. Steinbach:


An 01 version of StringValue is now available at
<url: http://home.no.net/alfps/cpp/lib/alfs_v01.zip>.

Seems I've partially rediscovered the joy of coding...

Old features:

   * A StringValue can be constructed from a literal in constant
     time with no dynamic allocation.

   * A StringValue can be constructed from a pointer and deletion
     operation (functor or function) in constant time, with no O(n)
     copying.

   * A StringValue can be copied and assigned in constant time with
     no dynamic allocation.

   * A StringValue can be safely constructed in other ways, including
     from a 'char const*' and from a 'std::string', but then involving
     O(n) copying and dynamic allocation.

   * A StringValue can be freely copied and assigned, but the value
     can not be modified.

New features:

   * A license reference (Boost license) is included in every file,
     resulting from comments by Roland Pibinger (thanks).

   * operator==, operator< added,
     resulting from comments by Barry <dhb52@2000.com> (thanks).

   * Implicit conversion to 'char const*' /removed/, because

   * StringValue is now a subclass of a new class StringValueOrNull,
     which supports passing null-values around. A StringValue is
     therefore implicitly convertible to StringValueOrNull. A
     StringValueOrNull value can only be explicitly converted to pure
     StringValue, then with checking of nullvalue & possible exception.

   * Support for << and >> stream i/o added (because of removal of
     implicit conversion to 'char const*').

Planned features:

   + In order to be useful in Windows programming, a wchar_t version is
     needed, i.e. templatization on the character type.

Comments, ideas, criticism etc. welcome!

Cheers, & hope this can be interesting,

- Alf