streaming redux

[Michel Fortin]

On 2010-12-29 01:32:17 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu 
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:

> I may be misunderstanding, but to me it seems that this design brings 
> more problems than it solves.

It seems we're approaching the problem from different angles. What you 
seem to want is a general way to serialize objects and data structures. 
For this task, your concept of Formatter is fine, except perhaps the 
virtual dispatch overhead might be unacceptable in some cases.

What I want is a way to serialize specific objects to specific formats. 
I don't need all of my objects to be serializable to a RSS feed, but 
for those who do I want them to output things correctly, and nothing's 
better for that than a formatter class that just takes some values as 
function arguments and transform them to a RSS feed, encapsulating the 
format within the formatter. This RSS formatter could in turn use an 
XML formatter to write the XML output, which in turn could use some 
kind a text formatter to convert the text to the desired encoding 
before sending it to the transport layer.

So our formatters have different purposes, but they can share the same pattern.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/