Traits

[bovlb]

I just finished reading Traits: a new and useful template technique by Nathan C. Myers. It's an interesting and powerful approach, but I had trouble getting past the elephant in the motivating example. He wanted to be able to support streams of arbitrary character types, but for each character type he needs an "int type" that is strictly wider,

Comments

[ashley_y]

In a language where creating datatypes is considered lightweight, the solution is obvious. For instance, ML has "'a option", Haskell has "Maybe a". But I guess this is trickier in a language without GC.

[_rck_]

I was going to say, missing a Monad.

[nickbarnes]

Inventing refinements to the C++ templates language reminds me of those people who figure out ways to say "web browser" in Latin.