Hello

I sadly find that at the last meeting export keyword was voted for
removal, and I still wander weather there are good technical reasons.

Export has been recently discussed here, before the meeting, and the
discussion proved to noisy for this newsgroup, so anyone still
interested is kindly directed to this thread on
comp.lang.c++.moderated now:
       http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/browse_thread/thread/ad69cc51488c4a3c/ce9ef235bf3f9941

I would like to know if there is now, after the vote, any chance or
possibility that the issue be considered or discussed, before the next
version of C++, that will likely again last for 10 years or so ... ?


P.S.
 Please bear with me and do not find this new post of my too
 aggressive (many people have had it with endless debate on export).
 I have a general feeling people are against export because it is
 controversial and not for solid reasons.
 Please replay on comp.lang.c++.moderated.



Thank you,
Timothy Madden

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Timothy Madden wrote:
>
> Hello
>
> I sadly find that at the last meeting export keyword was voted for
> removal, and I still wander weather there are good technical reasons.
>
> Export has been recently discussed here, before the meeting, and the
> discussion proved to noisy for this newsgroup, so anyone still
> interested is kindly directed to this thread on
> comp.lang.c++.moderated now:
>      http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/browse_thread/thread/ad69cc51488c4a3c/ce9ef235bf3f9941
>
> I would like to know if there is now, after the vote, any chance or
> possibility that the issue be considered or discussed, before the next
> version of C++, that will likely again last for 10 years or so ... ?

No. Many thought that the original introduction of export was a
mistake. The attempt to remove it from C++98 effectively failed
because EDG had an implementation (and that had cost them a good deal
to achieve). Had there not been an implementation then I am certain
that the vote to remove it would have succeeded.

It is now 12 years since it was placed in the Standard and it has been
substantially ignored. That is long enough and I am delighted to see
it go. Now the field is open to tackle the problems that it was
designed to address.
>
>
> P.S.
> Please bear with me and do not find this new post of my too
> aggressive (many people have had it with endless debate on export).
> I have a general feeling people are against export because it is
> controversial and not for solid reasons.
> Please replay on comp.lang.c++.moderated.

I think you are mistaken. People are against export because it was
ill-conceived (you may not realise it but it was a largely political
solution, unwanted by most implementers) and has failed to solve some
very real problems. EDG implemented it at a considerable cost (they
are a very small company). It isn't something you can simply bolt on
to a compiler but can(probably will) require a radical overhaul of the
entire implementation with the resulting suspension of other
development work. In addition we all know that major overhauls almost
inevitably result in periods of instability. These are not welcomed by
developers so implementers need a great deal of confidence that the
benefits will be worth it and cannot be achieved alternatively.

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On 26/07/2010 20.08, Francis Glassborow wrote:
[...]
>>
>> P.S.
>> Please bear with me and do not find this new post of my too
>> aggressive (many people have had it with endless debate on export).
>> I have a general feeling people are against export because it is
>> controversial and not for solid reasons.
>> Please replay on comp.lang.c++.moderated.
>
> I think you are mistaken. People are against export because it was
> ill-conceived (you may not realise it but it was a largely political
> solution, unwanted by most implementers)

One day, someone should grab a chair and write "The True Story
of Export". I've read everything and its contrary about it, and
I have probably seen one thousandth of the newsgroup threads on
the topic (which *has* been enough to wear me out, really; in
some of them, people who had attended the same meeting carried
completely opposite recollections on what happened and its whys;
absurd...).

I think there are three points we can't really argue about:

* the claim that it's too expensive to implement is an excuse.
 It's just that companies want to spend their time on other
 things (CLI, Java...).

 And it becomes absolutely ridiculous when the comparison is
 done with the effort it took to EDG: it's true that they are a
 lot better than the competition but, guys, they were just
 three people! (AFAIK, the implementation was done before
 William Miller joined them. Or they were four people.)

* language users need a way to use templates without bringing in
 all the dependencies; no politics here

* the removal of export sets a terrible precedent: companies
 send their representatives, discuss things ad infinitum
 --delaying an international standard for all of us to enjoy--
 then wake up a morning and decide that they don't want to
 implement something. What if they get used to the game?

--
 Gennaro Prota         |           name.surname yahoo.com
   Blog:                 <http://gennaroprota.wordpress.com/>
   Breeze C++ (preview): <https://sourceforge.net/projects/breeze/>
   Do you need expertise in C++?   I'm available.

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Gennaro Prota wrote:

> On 26/07/2010 20.08, Francis Glassborow wrote:
> [...]
>
>>
>>> P.S.
>>> Please bear with me and do not find this new post of my too
>>> aggressive (many people have had it with endless debate on export).
>>> I have a general feeling people are against export because it is
>>> controversial and not for solid reasons.
>>> Please replay on comp.lang.c++.moderated.
>>>
>>
>> I think you are mistaken. People are against export because it was
>> ill-conceived (you may not realise it but it was a largely political
>> solution, unwanted by most implementers)
>>
>
> One day, someone should grab a chair and write "The True Story
> of Export". I've read everything and its contrary about it, and
> I have probably seen one thousandth of the newsgroup threads on
> the topic (which *has* been enough to wear me out, really; in
> some of them, people who had attended the same meeting carried
> completely opposite recollections on what happened and its whys;
> absurd...).
>
> I think there are three points we can't really argue about:
>
> * the claim that it's too expensive to implement is an excuse.
> It's just that companies want to spend their time on other
> things (CLI, Java...).
>

Which their customers want them to focus on. Companies reasonably make
commercial decisions that is what their owners expect them to do.

>
> And it becomes absolutely ridiculous when the comparison is
> done with the effort it took to EDG: it's true that they are a
> lot better than the competition but, guys, they were just
> three people! (AFAIK, the implementation was done before
> William Miller joined them. Or they were four people.)
>

OK, but they did not exactly encourage others to implement it even knowing
that without other companies supporting it their efforts were not going to
reap much money even if it did give them a lot of kudos.


> * language users need a way to use templates without bringing in
> all the dependencies; no politics here
>

Indeed, but I said way back then that the 'export solution' just obstructed
a proper solution (just as trigraphs got tin the way of a clean solution to
character sets -- of course that was rather less important and was easy to
implement but you should know that many thousands of hours were spent on
that issue and it still creates problems today)


> * the removal of export sets a terrible precedent: companies
> send their representatives, discuss things ad infinitum
> --delaying an international standard for all of us to enjoy--
> then wake up a morning and decide that they don't want to
> implement something. What if they get used to the game?
>

No it isn't. Committees that refuse to admit their mistakes are far worse.
You seem to have a weird view of what and IS is. It is something produced by
consensus of those participating. I may be wrong but I am not aware of a
single National Body objecting to the removal of export. I do know of
several that are impatient to get the current FCD shipped as an IS so that
they can start work on the next release (which many individuals hope will be
shipped in a lot less than 10 years, and that is substantially because there
is a backlog of things that WG21 want to work on without delaying the
shipping the current work. That is exactly why Concepts got pulled, not with
the intention of killing them but with the intention of not delaying all the
other good stuff)

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