{"id":185,"date":"2008-07-08T20:01:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-08T18:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelins.se\/johan\/blog\/2008\/07\/standard-template-library-readable\/"},"modified":"2008-07-08T20:01:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-08T18:01:00","slug":"standard-template-library-readable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelins.se\/johan\/blog\/2008\/07\/standard-template-library-readable\/","title":{"rendered":">Standard Template Library – readable?"},"content":{"rendered":"

>Since I called some STL code readable, I’ve recieved numerous mails and comments. Fellow Qt\/KDE-er dhaumann added his 0.02 EUR to the pile<\/a> and showed the nicety of template specialization.<\/p>\n

Today I thought I’d follow up on some more comments.<\/p>\n

First of all, my personal opinion is that C++ is just as readable as most other languages. Even in this case. What can be less readable are the horrendus error messages that one can end up with. I’ve even compiled a small list of error messages<\/a> and what they really mean in plain English, but this does not – of course – help in ugly template cases. (Yes, the css of digitalfanatics.org is ugly and somewhat broken…)<\/p>\n

Back to readability. Even plain English cannot express the two operations that I suggested in a short way. Both cases results in fairly long sentences. Also, try to formally parse and express such sentences with more “interesting” transformation functions.<\/p>\n

“For every item in the source list, add 42 to it and replace it in the source list.<\/span>“<\/p>\n

“For every item in the source list, add 42 to it and append it to the end of the destination list.<\/span>“<\/p>\n

As the commenter zwabel pointed out, in the put-the-result-in-another-list a simple foreach loop showing the actual operation is good enough and reads better. I agree, but that kind of break my do-everything-on-a-line-thesis.<\/p>\n

Titus Brown pointed out that I do too much on a single line. I have to disagree with this – looping and doing something on each item is simple enough.<\/p>\n

Then I had lots of suggestions that I say that C++ isn’t functional, but I use a functional style in my example. I’m not sure that I agree. My impression of the STL is that it can perform a number of functions on lists that I’m interested in, for instance.<\/p>\n