Questions

[David Durham]

  Hi,   I just found this library today in search of something like it 
and was pleasently surprised.  Because I want to release some source 
code soon, I've recently been trying to move away from my little 
libraries that I've used for years to more standard stuff.  I've 
converted one of my projects to the STL now that it is defined and comes 
sufficiently well implemented on gcc and other compilers.  
  I was wondering if CommonC++ uses the STL whereever possible.  I 
don't guess much of it requires a whole lot of container-like use, 
perhaps the persistance stuff.  

  I could find any classes that dealt with time... maybe I missed it... 
I saw dates, but no date/time class.  I have one if necessary.

  Also, I have a class that is a readers/writers mutex which is simply 
wrapped around 2 other mutexes, so it would be simple to merge into 
CommonC++.  Basically, it allows 1 write lock but multiple simultaneous 
read locks.  Is there another way of doing that already in CommonC++?

  I also have an idea for a Path class which would have functionality 
that, constructed from a string, would have methods of getting the 
directory or the filename from it.  The implementation isn't as trivial 
as finding the last '/', because you have to correctly handle '.' as the 
entire path.  glibc does have pathname and dirname, but they comform to 
the SUSv2 standard, so are not guarenteed to be on all systems.  I 
suppose you could imagine other things you could use a Path class for, 
perhaps breaking the path up into all the directories components, making 
sure paths exist, touching files, etc... If this sounds like a worthy 
class to implement for CommonC++, I'd be glad to write it.  Currently, I 
have an .h file which has dirname, basename and touch functions, but 
again, I'm trying to move as much as possible away from these little 
implementations which aren't even autoconfiscated.

  Lastly, I have a couple of template classes which are used to create 
temporary buffers of memory or temporary arrays of object which get 
deallocted when the variable goes out of scope.   I know you'd think 
that auto_ptr in the STL can be used for this, but it can only (as far 
as I can tell) be used for a single object, and not an array of objects. 
Plus, my template class can auto cast to a pointer of the type it is 
instantiated for, or a void * and can be subscripted all of which 
auto_ptr doesn't do.  

-- Davy