On 12/4/2010 10:42 AM, joel falcou wrote: > Hey, > > recently I have been promoting Proto to a few fellow coworker in some > academic circles as well as in > some industrial contexts. Most of these evangelisation process turned > quite well but I felt a lot of time > that something wasn't clinking as it should and I think it's partially > because of the way proto presents > itself and how the docs examples and tutorials are structured. So here > is a few remarks and some > ideas on how to improve it. > > 1/ Proto describes itself as "Proto is a framework for building Domain > Specific Embedded Languages in C++. It provides tools for constructing, > type-checking, transforming and executing expression templates". A lot > of people I spoke too where wondering what expression templates were and, > as non-C++ expert, as honestly no clues what it was about. Others jumped > on the fact that "oh it enables some lazy evaluation idiom in C++ ?". > Few were acustomed to the EDSL idom. So, I wonder if we could not touch > more potential users by stating it in a way "lazy evaluation" appears.
Something along those lines would be a big improvement. I've gotten better at explaining Proto since I wrote those docs, and they could use a major facelift. I still like the fundamental idea of structuring the users guide around the idea of Proto as a compiler construction toolkit, with sections for front-end, intermediate form, and back-end. But before we get to that, there should be a Not-So-Quick Start with examples that gets people going. > 2/ What's the long term plan for context classes ? I remember discussign > their removal but will it happen (at least from the doc) ? > I spend quite a time demonstrating and reteaching transform over context > to a lot of people. I'll gladly see them > deprecated in 1.46 and maybe ditched in 1.47 or is there any reson to > keep them ? I have a long-standing work-item to go through the docs and examples and move them all from contexts to transforms. The contexts must go. > 3/ The documentation on-going example of the calculator is OK but it > lacks somethign between this and the full fledged, impressive > small lambda or futures sampels at the end. I noticed a huge gap between > the toy calculator and code people have to really write with > proto. On the other hand, the Boost'con 2010 talk examples of map_assign > was a real gem as it was simple enough to be grokkable by > everybody and yet demonstrated a lot. I think it should be in the > documentation instead of as a sample at the end. I remember > thinking "why it is not detaile dlike that in the doc" during your session. Good point. Could be part of a Not-So-Quick Start. > 4/ Maybe more diverse examples coudl eb turned into full fledged, > detailed, step by step tutorial. map_assing map_assing? > , some kind of simpel lazy > computation stuff (like the numerical integration sampel form Veldhuizen > paper), a larger example with a transform not tied to the grammar (a lot > of people assumed it could not be done), Yes, this an some other newer features are not described in the users' guide at all. That includes sub-domains, per-domain control over as_child and as_expr, external transforms, and now the expanded set of functional callables. > etc ... Thomas Heller and I > were brainstormign a bit and mayeb we can actually get a list, code it > and write the tutorial over. I can also offer internals of our SIMD code > or even from Quaff for a tutorial on how having proto enabled > intermediate representation is useful or on how to do pattern matchign > on AST. Any and all contributions are welcome. But no "assing" please. > 5/ Finally, this is starting to look like the Spirit site. What is "this"? Are you referring to cpp-next.com? I'm pretty committed to finishing the article series I started there, and it wouldn't be right to move it elsewhere at this point. > What about a > proto blog/website where articles liek this or sample code could be > detailed, introspected and published ? Perhaps after I finish the Expressive C++ article series on cpp-next.com, I could continue it elsewhere. -- Eric Niebler BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com _______________________________________________ proto mailing list proto@lists.boost.org http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/proto